28 Summers

28 Summers Plot Summary

Introduction

# Between the Tides: A Chronicle of Borrowed Time and Secret Hearts The cottage sits at the edge of forever, where Nantucket's Miacomet Pond meets the Atlantic in a conspiracy of salt and secrets. In the summer of 1993, twenty-four-year-old Mallory Blessing inherits this weathered sanctuary from her great-aunt Greta, along with a hundred thousand dollars and the kind of freedom that terrifies as much as it liberates. What begins as her brother Cooper's bachelor party weekend transforms into something far more dangerous when Jake McCloud steps off the ferry, his dark eyes holding promises neither of them should make. Twenty-eight years later, their story reads like a fever dream of stolen summers and impossible choices. One weekend each year, Labor Day weekend, Jake returns to the cottage. He tells his wife, Senator Ursula de Gournsey, that he's visiting Cooper. She believes him, until she doesn't. What unfolds is a love story that defies every rule, a political thriller that threatens to topple presidential ambitions, and a meditation on the mathematics of desire. Some secrets are worth keeping. Others will consume everything you've built, leaving only the taste of salt and the memory of what might have been.

Chapter 1: The Inheritance: A Cottage, A Weekend, and the Birth of Forever

The phone call comes on a Sunday morning in May, slicing through Mallory's half-sleep like a blade. Her father's voice crackles across the line with news that will reshape her world: Great-Aunt Greta is dead, and she's left Mallory a cottage on Nantucket. The same aunt her parents shunned for loving a woman after her husband died. The family pariah has just handed Mallory the keys to paradise. By July, Mallory is waitressing at the Summer House pool, her skin bronzed by salt air, her mousy hair bleached golden. The cottage sits like a weathered jewel between pond and ocean, its walls lined with books that smell of summer and possibility. She's never been happier, never felt more herself than in this place where the island chooses its people. Labor Day weekend arrives with Cooper's phone call. Her brother needs the cottage for his bachelor party before marrying Krystel, bringing two friends: Frazier Dooley, the troubled coffee heir, and Jake McCloud, the fraternity brother Mallory has flirted with over crackling phone lines but never met. When Jake steps off the ferry at Straight Wharf, Mallory's breath catches. He's tall and clean-cut with dark hair and eyes that change color with his moods, but it's something deeper that stops her heart. Recognition, perhaps. Or destiny wearing khakis and a polo shirt. The weekend explodes like a house of cards in a hurricane. Cooper abandons them for his controlling fiancée. Frazier storms out drunk and heartbroken, nearly drowning in the black water before washing up unconscious on Fat Ladies Beach. As dawn breaks over the cottage, Jake and Mallory lie fully clothed on her bed, his arm draped over her waist, both knowing something irreversible has begun. The ocean whispers its ancient secrets, and the cottage settles deeper into its foundation, preparing for the long story about to unfold.

Chapter 2: Same Time Next Year: Establishing the Sacred Ritual of September

The fortune cookie slips Jake saves from their first Chinese takeout dinner read like prophecy. His: "A fresh start will put you on your way." Hers: "Be careful or you could fall for some tricks today." They add "between the sheets" to each fortune and laugh, but Jake pockets both slips like talismans. When Cooper's wedding invitation arrives months later, Jake faces his first test. He's back with Ursula de Gournsey, his brilliant attorney girlfriend since eighth grade, whose ambition burns like a cold flame. At the wedding reception, Jake watches Mallory glide across the dance floor in ivory silk, her hair swept up with baby's breath. When he cuts in on her dance, when she leads him to a supply closet for sixty stolen seconds of kissing in the dark, he knows he's lost. "You'll come to Nantucket Labor Day weekend?" she whispers against his lips. "No matter what," he promises. Labor Day 1994 arrives like salvation. Cooper brings his rebound girlfriend and disappears again, leaving Jake and Mallory alone in their private universe. They establish rituals without speaking them aloud: burgers grilled over charcoal, corn on the cob, sliced tomatoes with balsamic vinegar. Cat Stevens on the stereo. A single hydrangea bloom in a mason jar beside a flickering votive candle. After dinner, they watch "Same Time, Next Year" on the cottage's old television. Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn, meeting annually for twenty-six years, aging together in stolen increments while living separate lives. The movie becomes their blueprint, their justification, their curse. "What if we did this?" Jake asks as the credits roll. "Same time next year. Just once a year." Mallory knows it's insane, impossible, perfect. They shake hands like business partners sealing a deal, but their fingers linger. The cottage remembers. The harvest table bears witness. The ocean keeps their secrets.

Chapter 3: Parallel Lives: Building Worlds Around Three Days of Truth

The years blur together in a kaleidoscope of anticipation and ache. Jake marries Ursula in a lavish Notre Dame ceremony while Mallory watches from three hundred miles away, reading about the brilliant young lawyer destined for greatness. She dates other men but no one measures up to a ghost who visits three days a year. Jake's marriage settles into polite distance and professional ambition. Ursula makes partner at a prestigious firm, working eighteen-hour days while Jake lobbies for pharmaceutical companies and hates himself a little more each morning. They live like elegant strangers, sharing expensive apartments and separate dreams. Mallory builds her life around the cottage and the secret it contains. She becomes a beloved English teacher at Nantucket High School, inspiring teenagers with poetry while hiding her own greatest love story. Every improvement to the cottage is made with Jake in mind: the outdoor shower, the renovated bathroom, the hydrangeas that bloom purple and blue. Their annual reunions become masterpieces of compressed intimacy. Jake learns the rhythm of Mallory's breathing, the gap between her bottom teeth that makes her smile endearingly imperfect. She discovers his love of Cat Stevens, his grief for his twin sister Jessica who died of cystic fibrosis at thirteen, his gentle way of making omelets with whatever ingredients she has on hand. In 2001, both women give birth within months of each other. Ursula has Elizabeth while Mallory has Lincoln with Frazier after a drunken encounter at Cooper's wedding. The children complicate everything and nothing. Jake adores his daughter but finds himself imagining a different life where he and Mallory raise their children together. Every September, Jake teaches Link to sail and throw a baseball, becoming the uncle who visits once a year, the man who makes his mother glow differently for three precious days.

Chapter 4: The Weight of Secrets: When Deception Becomes a Way of Life

By the mid-2000s, their secret has survived a dozen close calls. There was the night Mallory's cottage caught fire and the rescue team found Jake half-dressed in her bedroom. There was the morning they encountered Jake's college friend while kayaking, forcing them to paddle away like fugitives. Each near-miss reminds them how precarious their arrangement has become. Jake's professional life becomes a series of false starts and compromises. He leaves pharmaceutical lobbying for development work, then tries teaching, then returns to lobbying for causes he can believe in. Nothing satisfies him because his real life happens only three days a year, in a cottage by the sea where time moves differently. The weight of deception grows heavier with each passing year. Jake deletes Mallory's phone messages before Ursula can hear them. Mallory deflects questions about her love life from colleagues and family. They become expert at compartmentalization, living double lives with the skill of trained spies. Their twentieth reunion in 2012 feels like a miracle and a curse. They're in their forties now, marked by time but still magnetic to each other. Jake's hair is silver-streaked, Mallory's face shows laugh lines from years of teaching, but their chemistry remains undimmed. They've perfected the art of living an entire relationship in seventy-two hours. The world around them changes dramatically. Social media makes secrets harder to keep. Their children are growing up, asking pointed questions about their parents' lives. Jake's daughter Bess idolizes her mother while Link splits time between Nantucket and Vermont, unaware that his mother's heart belongs to a man he's never met. The cottage witnesses their evolution from desperate lovers to something deeper and more dangerous. They know each other's bodies better than their own, can predict each other's thoughts, finish each other's sentences. They've built an entire emotional universe that exists only on Labor Day weekend, sustained by memory and anticipation for the other 362 days of the year.

Chapter 5: Political Ambitions: How Public Dreams Threaten Private Love

Ursula's political star rises like a comet through Washington's dark sky. She wins a Senate seat in 2008, becoming the media darling known as "UDG"—young, beautiful, brilliant, and ruthlessly ambitious. Jake supports her publicly while privately feeling more isolated than ever, finding purpose only in his work with the Cystic Fibrosis Research Foundation. By 2015, presidential whispers follow Ursula through Capitol corridors. Her team conducts opposition research on their own candidate, hunting for vulnerabilities before her enemies do. They find nothing damaging in her past, but Jake's annual disappearances raise questions that grow louder with each passing year. The first crack appears at Cooper's wedding when Ursula mentions Jake's annual Nantucket trips. Cooper's face goes blank—he doesn't know what she's talking about. The realization hits like cold water: Jake has been lying to his wife for over two decades. Ursula's suspicions grow slowly, fed by small inconsistencies. Jake's stories about weekends with Cooper don't align. He returns from Nantucket different—relaxed, happy, guilty. She finds sand dollars and fortune cookie slips in his desk drawer, artifacts of a life she doesn't recognize. The breaking point comes when Leland Gladstone publishes an article about "Same Time Next Year" relationships, calling her source "Violet" but describing details unmistakably Mallory's. Ursula reads about the beach cottage, the fortune cookies, the twenty-year affair, and knows with prosecutorial certainty that her marriage is built on lies. She calls Cooper, fishing for confirmation. He lies to protect his sister, but his voice betrays him. Ursula hangs up knowing the truth: her husband has been unfaithful for decades, and she's been too busy conquering the world to notice. The cottage holds its breath, sensing the storm approaching. Even the fortune cookies seem ominous now, their predictions reading like warnings of the reckoning to come.

Chapter 6: The Reckoning: When Two Women Meet Over One Man's Heart

The confrontation comes on a blazing August afternoon in 2019. Mallory is alone in the cottage when a black sedan appears at the end of the dusty road. Through the screen door, she sees Ursula de Gournsey stepping out, immaculate in blue linen despite the journey. "I was hoping we could talk," Ursula says, and Mallory knows their twenty-six-year dance is over. They sit in the living room like civilized enemies, iced tea sweating in crystal glasses. Ursula's eyes catalog everything—the books Jake has given Mallory, the sand dollars on the shelf, the harvest table scarred by decades of shared meals. Evidence of a parallel life, a shadow marriage that has endured longer than most real ones. "I need you to stop seeing Jake," Ursula says finally. Her voice is steady, but her hands shake. "He can't come this Labor Day or any Labor Day while I'm running for president." Mallory feels the words like physical blows. No more September reunions. No more three days of stolen happiness. No more Jake, perhaps forever. "Why are you talking to me?" Mallory asks. "If you don't want him to come to Nantucket, tell him." "If I tell him that I know," Ursula's voice breaks slightly, "I'm afraid he'll leave me." The admission hangs between them, raw and vulnerable. Two women who have loved the same man, who have built their lives around him in different ways, finally facing each other across the wreckage of their choices. Mallory looks out at the ocean, at the waves that have witnessed every moment of her love affair. She thinks of Jake's hands, his laugh, the way he reads fortune cookies aloud. She thinks of Ursula's ambition, her daughter Bess, the country that might need its first female president. "Okay," she says quietly. "You have my word." Two weeks later, Jake arrives for what he doesn't know will be their final weekend. Mallory hides in the dunes, watching him search for her, hearing him call her name with increasing desperation. When she finally emerges, they share one last kiss on the front porch, with only the Atlantic as witness.

Chapter 7: Final Tides: Love, Loss, and the Legacy of Borrowed Time

The cottage grows quiet in the months that follow. Mallory tends her garden, teaches her students, tries to rebuild a life without its secret center. The cancer comes like a thief in the night—melanoma, aggressive and unforgiving. By the time they catch it, it has already begun its final journey through her body. Link calls the number his mother kept hidden in her desk drawer. Jake's voice breaks when he hears the news. "Tell her to hold on," he says. "Tell her I'm coming." Jake arrives at the cottage like a man returning from war, aged by grief but still unmistakably himself. He tends to Mallory with the devotion of a lifetime lover, which is exactly what he is. He reads to her from the books that have passed between them over the years, holds her hand as she sleeps, tells her stories of the life they might have lived together. The revelation of their long affair forces Link to reexamine everything he thought he knew about his mother. The cottage that seemed like a sanctuary now reveals itself as a shrine to impossible love. The books on the shelves, the careful placement of furniture, the outdoor shower built for two—all of it designed around three days a year when Mallory became fully herself. As Mallory's strength fades, she and Jake finally speak the words they've held back for twenty-eight years. They talk about the children they might have had, the life they could have built, the choices that led them to this moment. There is regret but also gratitude for the love they've shared, however constrained by circumstances. In her final hours, Mallory lies in the bed where they've made love for nearly three decades, Jake's hand in hers, the sound of waves providing the soundtrack to their goodbye. She dies as she lived in this place—completely herself, completely loved, completely at peace with the impossible choice she made all those years ago. Ursula wins the presidency, but the victory feels hollow. She thinks often of Mallory, the woman who gave up everything so that Ursula could have it all. Link scatters his mother's ashes on Miacomet Pond, watching them drift across the water like stardust. The cottage will be his now, along with its memories and mysteries.

Summary

Jake McCloud and Mallory Blessing created something rare and precious in their twenty-eight summers together: a love story that existed outside the normal rules of time and commitment. Their annual reunions became a masterclass in the art of loving deeply while living separately, of finding completeness in stolen moments rather than conventional promises. They chose intensity over security, passion over propriety, three perfect days over a lifetime of compromise. The cottage stands empty now, but it remains a testament to the power of choosing love over convention, of creating sacred space in an ordinary world. Their borrowed time became eternal, their secret love the most honest thing either of them ever did. In the end, they proved that some loves are too pure to survive in the real world, too perfect to coexist with the messy compromises of marriage and public life. But perhaps that's what made it beautiful—not despite its impossibility, but because of it. The ocean continues its eternal conversation with the shore, and somewhere in the space between memory and dream, Jake and Mallory dance to Cat Stevens while the waves applaud and the stars write their names across the summer sky.

About Author

Loading

Elin Hilderbrand

Hilderbrand crafts narratives that delve into the intricate dynamics of family, friendship, and personal transformation, often set against the backdrop of Nantucket Island. Her novels frequently intertwine themes of love, loss, and the revelation of secrets, exploring complex issues such as domestic abuse and health scares. The vivid portrayal of Nantucket in her books enhances the immersive reading experience, while her accessible prose and engaging storytelling make her works popular beach reads.\n\nIn her career, Hilderbrand has not only authored numerous bestsellers, but she has also achieved significant milestones. Her book "Summer of '69" marked a career highlight by debuting at #1 on the "New York Times" bestseller list. Her collaborative work, "The Academy", co-written with her daughter Shelby Cunningham, signifies a personal and professional milestone. Meanwhile, her earlier book, "The Beach Club", was distinguished by People Magazine as “Beach Book of the Week.” Her narrative style, combined with her exploration of relatable themes, continues to resonate with readers seeking both escapism and depth.\n\nThe impact of Hilderbrand's work extends beyond the pages of her books, as she is celebrated for her resilience and openness about her personal battles, such as her experience as a breast cancer survivor. This aspect of her bio underscores her role as a motivational figure, sharing her journey through public speaking engagements. Her novels' adaptations, including "The Perfect Couple" on Netflix, further amplify her influence and connect her storytelling to a broader audience, confirming her position as a beloved figure in contemporary literature.

Read more