Just for the Summer

Content Warning: This section mentions undiagnosed mental illnesses and past child neglect.

Emma is a protagonist and narrator of the novel; her last name is omitted to protect the climactic plot twist where she learns that Daniel Grant from Part of Your World (2022) is her biological brother. Emma is a 28-year-old travel nurse. She loves to garden and always wanted a cat but moves too often to sustain either interest. Like her mother, Amber, Emma isn’t “really good at sitting still” (88). Her aversion to staying put and settling down is due to her traumatic childhood. Her mother neglected and eventually abandoned her, after which she cycled through unstable foster homes before finally settling with her best friend Maddy and Maddy’s two moms. Emma is seen by the few people who know her as “a woman who could leave a place and never look back. She kept her life reduced to two suitcases because she didn’t get sentimental about anything” (236). Her childhood stuffed unicorn, Stuffie, serves as a token of her childhood innocence and represents the last time she was able to make sentimental connections to anyone or anything.

Emma believes her gift of “extreme empathy paired with detachment” makes her a great nurse but eventually realizes it keeps her distant from others (189).