Surely Kit knew he was on his way home. Hadn’t John Nelson told him he’d called at least ten times since the accident? Campbell leaned against a fat Georgian column, scanning the yard, every corner of the shadowed veranda framed by the last twist of sunset.
Campbell’s mind drifted back to the beautiful woman living in his mother’s art studio. Quinn. Though he couldn’t recall whether it was her first or last name.
He had news for her. He wasn’t about to argue with someone who believed what most did.
He’dneverbeen indifferent to Kit.
Though he’d always been close to his cousins,having a brother was different. He could still picture himself outside the hospital nursery the day Kit was born, knuckles pressed to the glass, a dawning sense of wonder hitting him like a blow to the head as he stared at the tiny, flushed, hours-old bundle in the bassinet.
He hadn’t been given many people in this life to love.
Unfortunately, he’d learned—the hard way—how easily a parent could keep you from their child if they wanted to.
Through aching, bloodshot eyes, Campbell watched the sun vanish, the horizon ablaze with crimson and gold, deep blue and violet. His apologies to Kit, for everything he hadn’t done to make his life better and everything he’d done wrong, were swallowed by the hush of the night. The chirp of crickets in the azaleas lining the house—a sound he only heard, or perhaps only noticed, when he was home—stirred a hollow sense of recognition.
He longed to snap a shutter, to capture the majestic beauty just beyond his vision, but whether from exhaustion, depression, or the gnawing realization that he truly was the terrible person everyone believed, he couldn’t summon the heart to photograph the Rise. Barren fields, shallow creeks, and dense pine thickets—fields as familiar to him as his own reflection—left his stomach unsettled. Once, he had roamed this place with a scrappy mutt at his heels, a knapsack of treasures slung over his shoulder, and stories of his ancestors spinning through his mind.
Land he’d cherished with everything in him. Land he’d worked alongside his grandfather until his hands bled. Land in his family for generations. Blood spilled, tears shed, love taken.
Never, not in his wildest dreams, had he imagined selling it. Not until his father, and later Celia, drove a stake of revulsion and loneliness straight through him.
His attachment to this place had almost buried him.
His great-grandfather had laid the foundation for theveranda he stood on and lost a finger chopping wood out back. Grandmother True had given birth to four healthy babies and two stillborns in the bedroom at the top of the stairs. His father had claimed the house, the land, the entire town, when he returned from Korea, a decided limp of authority forever echoing off heart pine planks.
And young Campbell? He had claimed it, too. Deep inside, though never by act or declaration. His was not a ringing endorsement. Not after he understood what it meant to his father.
Not after he realized his acceptance, hisrejection, held power.
Shirttail dangling mid-thigh, Campbell surveyed his birthright, the wind against his chest soothing him as only the sight through a camera’s viewfinder could.
He almost hated how much it felt like home.
The Rise. That’s what the townsfolk had named it.The smartest piece of property to be had in South Carolina’s upstatethe newspaper claimed the day after Campbell’s great-grandfather galloped away from Andersonville on a half-starved horse, the war behind him. Deck W. True had read that article while sitting in the charred remains of a barn, drinking bitter chicory and smoking moldy tobacco. The next day, he rode into Promise, bought the land, and built a Greek Revival mansion fit for a king, as if guided by the great Almighty himself.
Or so he said years later.
From that point on, it was called the Rise.
Campbell knew every word of every story; they flowed through his heart in velvet whispers and came to him, vividly, in his dreams. Sitting on John Nelson’s bony knee, he’d listened, memorizing his grandfather’s tales, intending to pass them down tohischildren one day.
He’d once had everything planned.
Fuck, he thought, jamming the heels of his hands into hiseyes. Now the kitchen looked like a wealthy socialite had done the decorating—which was totally on the mark. The chip in the dining room floor from his roller-skates? Filled in and glossed over. The tree in the back where his tire swing had once hung? Chopped down the day he left for Duke. Celia had allowed a painting of his grandmother, done by a local artist, and his damn baseball trophies to remain simply because visitors would ask about them if she didn’t.
Every other piece of soul in the house had withered and died under a vengeful woman’s tutelage, no longer even worthy of a photograph.
But the land? The land she hadn’t dared to master.
The shadows at Campbell’s feet quivered and settled. The streetlight at the end of the oak-lined drive flickered, then held steady. A bat took flight above the trees, soaring in wild, erratic loops through the darkness. Listening for his family’s return, he battled disappointment and fatigue but heard only the sounds of the night. The solitary rustle of leaves against a picket fence, the distinctive screech of a barn owl, branches cracking in the wind.
A healthy insomniac for the past five years due to an insane schedule across multiple time zones, you’d think exhaustion would be second nature by now.
Feeling one part kin and two parts interloper, Campbell reentered the lumbering house atop the Rise, the weight of three generations’ expectations settling heavily on his shoulders.
FONTANA
“Bastard,” Fontana whispered, trembling beneath grass-stained denim she wished she’d had the foresight to wash the night before. As the black bullet of a car blended into the glare of the setting sun, she stumbled backward, sinking between two archaic gas pumps. Hidden in the shade of a rusted tin awning, tears coursed down her face as she fought to suppress them. Furious and humiliated, she balled her hands into fists and rubbed her cheeks until they stung.
