Middletown, Indiana. Summer 1960.
Tommy Kelly is nineteen, with a mechanic's hands and a love too big for a small town that has already decided what he's worth. Susan Hayes is nineteen, with notebooks full of questions and a future mapped out by others. They've been in love in secret for two years when Tommy climbs into his sky-blue Chevrolet to race in a stock car event—and prove he deserves what he loves.
He won't come back.
From 1960 to 2023, Susan lives through sixty-three years without ever setting her grief down. She becomes a librarian, shelves books, fills notebooks, leaves flowers beneath an oak tree. She turns down Indianapolis, turns down David, turns down anything that feels like forgetting. Not out of resignation—by choice. Because some loves can't be replaced. They're carried.
When Summer Fades is a novel about the endurance of love after loss, about how an entire life can be built around an absence and still remain, despite everything, a full life.
