by scorchings
Seventeen-year-old Vince Calloway has always been portable—moved from city to city by parents who treat him like one more piece of luggage. When they send him back to Rainer’s Glen, the rain-soaked Pacific Northwest town he barely remembers from five years earlier, he expects another temporary stop. On his first night he finds an old photograph tucked under a magnet: four kids in a green backyard. One is unmistakably him at twelve. The others—warm, grinning Sam; sharp-eyed Amelia; and quiet, watchful Marlo—are waiting for him when he steps off the plane. Their greetings are too careful. Their silences too practiced. They remember the summer he doesn’t. Especially what happened inside the abandoned community rec center that has stood padlocked and “closed pending review” ever since. As fragments of that final afternoon surface, Vince realizes the town has been holding its breath for five years. He can keep drifting the way he always has—or stay long enough to uncover the single sentence that changed everything. SOMETIMES AFTER is a quiet, emotionally precise coming-of-age novel about memory, the weight of a childhood lie, and the stubborn courage it takes to return to a place—and a self—you never truly left behind.
