Set in sweltering Polk County, What We Did That Summer follows Becca, a twenty-year-old home from college after a breakup, as she collides with the strict, image-obsessed piety of her evangelical parents and the effortless charm of Lee, a long-time family fixture who's shaped her life since childhood. What starts as attention curdles into fixation, then into a claustrophobic push-pull of temptation and restraint that tightens under the weight of church gossip, small-town judgment, and the family's own violent hypocrisies. Across one charged season of chores, porches, and barns, the novel traces Becca's reckoning with desire and agency, how longing, power, and shame can warp the meanings of love and protection, and asks what it costs to step over a line everyone pretends doesn't exist.