1
RHODES
AGE TWENTY-SEVEN
My SUV bumpedalong the gravel road, jarring my spine as I hit an especially painful divot. I added regrading the driveway to my mental list. What was one more thing when the list was already at least two hundred tasks long?
I forced myself to loosen my grip on the steering wheel, my knuckles starting to ache from the force of my hold. As I shifted my hands, I glimpsed the damp patches my palms had left behind. The little smears of wetness had anger flaring to life somewhere deep.
I was grateful for the emotion. It was a heck of a lot better than the fear and anxiety that had been swirling around me for weeks as I packed up my cottage in town. I wouldn’t fail at this. Not again.
Taking a deep breath, I lowered my speed to better navigate the potholes. If I focused on the road and nothing else, maybe the panic couldn’t get me. At least, not this time.
I made the trek into a game. How steady could I keep my vehicle on this beat-to-smithereens road? I did a pretty damn good job,but the road came to an end eventually, opening to a makeshift parking area of sorts.
I slowed to a stop but still didn’t look up. Instead, I focused on my gratitude. The incredible chocolate chip scone I’d had for breakfast. How the sunrise had painted the mountains in a rainbow of colors. The text I’d gotten from Fallon telling me I had this. The fact that I was breathing.
I switched my focus to those breaths. In for three, out for three. The counting kept them even, a math equation saving me from a vision-blackening panic attack.
In. Two. Three.
I lifted my focus a few inches.
Out. Two. Three.
My gaze caught on a massive flower bed. It was once a riot of color, full of penstemons, iris, and yarrow. Now, it was all just…dead.
Like my mom. My dad. Emilia. And me, in a way. ThemeI’d been then had died right along with them, thanks to old wiring in an even older house. A home that had been so full of life and love once but had been left half-burned for the past fourteen years.
Now, finally, I was ready to change that. To bring it back to life. And maybe, just maybe, I’d find some of the pieces of me that had died that night along the way.
I opened my SUV door and slid out. My boot-clad feet hit the gravel, and I forced my gaze up, up, up. There it was.
My mouth and throat went bone-dry. I tried to swallow against it, but everything just seemed to stick. My eyes burned, and I started counting.
In. Two. Three.
Out. Two. Three.
I’d already made it longer than last time. Thirty seconds into my last attempt, a panic attack had grabbed hold—one so vicious I’d needed days to recover.
But that was a year ago. A lot had changed in a year. I was braver. Stronger.
I’d already been through hell. I could reclaim the place that hadonce held my happiest memories.No.A place thatstillheld those memories. I just needed to excavate them from the rubble.
I kept up with my counting in the background, the steady one, two, three keeping my panic at bay, and really took in the structure in front of me. The historic Victorian looked completely normal on one side, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. But on the other, there was only wreckage and ruin.
The fire had sparked in the southeast corner of the house, somewhere between my parents’ and Emilia’s rooms. They hadn’t stood a chance. The only mercy was that the smoke had gotten to them long before the fire did.
My hand slipped beneath my worn tee, fingers wandering over the puckered skin on my side. It was the only evidence the nightmare had been real. A mark of everything I’d been through.
The fire. The fall. The month in the hospital, where my only real comfort was Fallon. It was a miracle that one of our neighbors had gotten up to let their new puppy out to pee in the middle of the night and saw the blaze in the distance. They’d reached me before the EMTs had, but Fire and Rescue had been quick to follow, putting out the blaze and saving the remaining two-thirds of the house.
I didn’t remember any of that. I’d been comatose and numb to it all. But that numbness hadn’t lasted long. Even with the powerful drugs the ICU doctors gave me, I lived in agony for weeks. And the physical aspects of that were only the tip of the iceberg.
My aunt had come immediately, of course, but when she found out she wouldn’t have access to the trust my parents had left behind, she suddenly didn’t have the energy and resources to take care of a thirteen-year-old. And there was no one else. So, it was in that sterile hospital room that a social worker told me I’d become a ward of the state.
Tears hadn’t found me then, the mental numbness returning. I let the physical pain grab hold as I endured torturous hours of rehab and therapy. I held tightly to that so the pain in my heart didn’t swallow me whole.
