The Unexpected Everything - Morgan Matson Page 0,138

the rain was running down my face and I wasn’t even moving to wipe it away. So the house had been torn down. My dad had sold it; I knew that much, so maybe it had been here for a while before it was knocked down? I looked around, as though I was going to get some information from the deserted street, but there wasn’t anything. Just an empty space where our house, my whole world when I was a kid, had been. And now, unless you’d known, you wouldn’t even stop to slow down and look at it. You would never have known anything was there at all.

I waited for the devastation to come—the tears, the feeling that things were falling apart. But it didn’t.

I looked around through the rain, at the place where our house had been, and realized that it was just a piece of land. That was all it had ever been. It was the fact that the three of us had lived there together that had made it special. But now when I thought about home . . .

A series of images flashed through my mind. It was my dad in the kitchen, heating me up a slice of pizza, along with one for himself. It was walking back and forth with Palmer between our two houses. It was running up and down the stairs like crazy people as we gathered scavenger-hunt supplies. It was sharing a piece of cheesecake with my father. It wasn’t the farmhouse, not anymore.

“Hi.” I turned to see Clark standing next to me, raising his voice to be heard over the rain. He looked at the empty lot, then at me, his brow furrowed, and I could see just how much he was regretting this. “Andie, I—”

“Car,” I said, taking his hand and walking back across the street toward it, feeling like there wasn’t any need for us to get even more soaked. I climbed into the passenger seat, and Clark got behind the wheel a few seconds later. When he shut the door, it was like someone had turned off the volume—with the rain gone, it was suddenly very quiet, and much warmer.

“I’m so sorry,” Clark said immediately. “I didn’t realize—”

“It’s okay,” I said. I gave him a half smile. “Really.”

“Really?”

I nodded. “Yeah.” There was just the sound of the rain, then I said, “I always thought I didn’t want to come back here. I’ve been avoiding this place for five years. And in the end . . .” I looked back at where the house had been once more. “It would have been better to do this years ago. I was making it so much harder for myself when it didn’t have to be.” What Bri had said to Toby about Wyatt flashed into my head. “I think it’s better to face it,” I said.

Something passed over Clark’s face, and he looked down at the steering wheel.

“I do wish I could have gone back inside before it got knocked down, though.” Clark nodded, and I knew he probably assumed it was for sentimental reasons. I paused for only a second, listening to the rain hitting the window, before telling him what I’d never told anyone. “I always thought maybe my mom left something for me in there.”

“Like what?”

I shrugged and turned my back to the empty space where the farmhouse had been. “I don’t even know,” I said, realizing as I did that it was the truth. I’d never gotten further in my head than “something left for me in the house.” I’d just wanted some proof—beyond my mother buying out the feminine-care aisle of CVS—that she’d left something for me, something so that I could pretend, at least for a moment or two, that she was still with me. “Just . . . something.” I gave it one last look, then turned to Clark. “We can go now,” I said, giving him a smile. “I’m good.”

Clark squeezed my hand, then started the engine, and headed back toward the center of town. I kicked off my wet flip-flops and propped my feet on the dashboard, settling in for what I knew would be at least a half hour’s journey. I looked over and saw that he was gripping the steering wheel hard, his hands flexing against it and a muscle working in his jaw, like he was struggling with something. I started to say something, then realized that maybe I should wait for him to speak, just like