Let’s be honest: while VK is a legitimate platform, user-uploaded copies of copyrighted books like Every Summer After are almost always piracy.
The alternative: The book is widely available via Audible (narrated brilliantly by AJ Bridel), Kindle Unlimited (often included), local libraries (Libby/Overdrive), and paperback.
The river that cut through St. Petersburg—its icy veins glimmering under the midnight sun—held a hidden compartment beneath an old, rusted bridge. Carley, armed with a borrowed metal detector and a borrowed sense of bravery, dragged a rope into the water at night, hoping the “key” she’d spoken of might be literal.
Instead of a golden talisman, she found a weather‑worn notebook, its pages filled with the looping cursive of an unknown hand. The entries described a family lineage of “watchers,” people tasked with recording the city’s “unseen moments”: a street performer who vanished after a perfect pirouette, a stray cat that appeared only during thunderstorms, a melody that could be heard on the wind but never recorded.
The notebook ended abruptly with a single line: “When the lilies bloom again, we must return.” Carley posted the find to her VK channel. The comment section exploded. Some called it a hoax, others a call to adventure. One name kept resurfacing: Mikhail “Mik” Petrovski, a quiet art student who responded to every post with a single, cryptic emoji—an hourglass. every summer after carley fortune vk
Carley never saw Mik in person that summer, but she felt his presence in the rustle of the river reeds, and she began to understand that the “key” was less about a physical object and more about a promise: to keep watching.
A sudden heatwave turned the city’s canals into mirrors of the sky, and a strange phenomenon began—people started seeing fleeting reflections of themselves that were not quite right. A teenage boy in the market caught a glimpse of himself as an elderly man, a middle‑aged woman saw a child version of herself playing in a field of lilies.
Carley’s channel exploded with speculation. Some called it a glitch, others a collective hallucination. Mik, now a regular collaborator, suggested that the bottles might be leaking—that the memories they held were trying to escape.
Carley and Mik ventured into the hidden garden at night, armed with lanterns and the brass compass. They found a single bottle cracked, its contents spilling out onto the stone floor: a cascade of shimmering light that formed a vortex. The vortex opened onto a mirror‑like surface—a portal to the Other St. Petersburg, a version of the city where time flowed backward and memories manifested physically. Let’s be honest: while VK is a legitimate
Stepping through, they witnessed the city’s past—grand celebrations from the early 1900s, a devastating fire that never happened, a love story between a sailor and a baker’s daughter that ended in a kiss under the moonlit river. In that mirror world, Carley saw herself holding a notebook identical to the one she had found the previous summer, but the pages were blank, waiting to be written.
When they emerged, the cracked bottle sealed itself, and the strange reflections stopped. Carley posted a single black screen for a day, then uploaded a new vlog titled “The Other Summer.” The video ended with the line: “Every memory we keep is a doorway; every doorway we open changes the world we think we know.”
Mik’s family heirloom— the brass compass—began to spin wildly whenever Carley approached a bottle. She realized the compass was not a navigational tool but a sensitivity detector, pointing toward the strongest unresolved memories.
The compass led them to a forgotten subway tunnel beneath the city, where a massive, dust‑covered bottle lay half‑buried. Inside, they found a set of blueprints for a structure that matched no known building in St. Petersburg, but resembled a celestial observatory aligned with the stars above the river. The alternative: The book is widely available via
The blueprints hinted at a “Convergence”—an event when the city’s recorded memories would align with celestial cycles, amplifying the power of the bottles. The next convergence was predicted to occur on the summer solstice of 2018.
Carley announced a citywide “Memory Night,” inviting everyone to bring an object, a story, or a song to the hidden garden to be placed into a new bottle. Over 5 000 citizens participated, turning the garden into a glowing sea of glass. The collective energy was palpable; the air thrummed with anticipation.
Is this the ultimate nostalgic friends-to-lovers story?
If you have been anywhere near BookTok or the summer bestseller lists in the last year, you have likely seen the bright, moody cover of Carley Fortune’s debut novel, Every Summer After.
Marketed as the read of the summer, this book promises nostalgia, lake days, and a heavy dose of second-chance romance. But does it live up to the hype? Today, we are diving into the world of Percy and Sam to see if this is the heartbreaking, hopeful romance you’ve been looking for.