Sixteen-year-old Emma Collins never wanted to move to Willow Creek. After her parents' divorce, she and her mother trade city noise for a lakeside town where gossip moves faster than the wind off the water. Everyone seems to already belong, while Emma feels like a guest in her own story—armed with nothing but her sketchbook and a private promise to be braver than last year.

Her plan is simple: keep her head down, help her mom at the café, and maybe survive one quiet summer. But then she hears a single guitar chord drifting across the lake.

It belongs to Noah Carter, the boy next door.

To Willow Creek, Noah is half rumor, half legend—the basketball star who sometimes disappears, the guitarist who never plays unless he has to, the boy who keeps his words locked behind a silver pick he wears around his neck. To Emma, he's the first person who makes this strange town feel alive. Quiet, steady, unreadable—yet somehow always there when she least expects it.

From café shifts and scavenger hunts to lantern-light festivals and three-legged races gone wrong, Emma's summer becomes a series of moments she can't stop sketching down. Sometimes awkward, sometimes magical, sometimes so close to something more that her heart skips in time with his guitar strings.

But Noah has secrets he doesn't share, and Emma knows that first love is fragile. A stormy rumor can travel faster than truth in Willow Creek, and the closer she draws to Noah, the more she learns how quickly trust can crack. Still, even in silence, even in the spaces between words, she feels it: connection, undeniable and terrifying.

As fireworks burst over the lake and summer reaches its peak, Emma realizes that this isn't just about surviving a season. It's about finding out who she is when she chooses to step out of the shadows—and who Noah is when he finally lets someone see him.

Because summer doesn't last forever.
But maybe first love does.

Poignant, romantic, and filled with the glow of small-town summer nights, When We Met That Summer is the unforgettable first book in the Love Across the Seasons trilogy. Perfect for fans of Jenny Han's The Summer I Turned Pretty and Kasie West's Listen to Your Heart, this story will sweep you into a world of fireworks, secrets, friendship, and the kind of first love that changes everything.