good.”
He hugged me tighter, his hands wandering over the small of my back. For a second or two we were face to face, nose to nose. I was a prisoner of those incredible eyes. Our mouths… inches apart.
“Come on,” I said abruptly. “I’ve seen enough.”
We walked down through the living room, where I thanked Mrs. O’Shea with a big hug. The house was warm and cozy, the way I remembered it. Right now it smelled like cookies, and cinnamon.
On the way back to the front door however, I stopped dead.
“What?” Luke asked, cocking his head.
A chill wound its way down along my spine. It spiked my adrenaline, made my heart race like crazy. I could feel my palms actually beginning to sweat.
“What is it Kayla?” he asked gently. “Another memory?”
I stared down at the floor, just on the other side of the front door. A flood of emotions crashed over me in a giant wave.
“The foyer,” I said, my voice barely registering.
Luke stood there quietly, letting me have the moment. For a long stretch of silence, neither of us said anything.
“This is where the police officers stood,” I said, my mouth going dry. “On the night they told me both my parents were dead.”
Seven
KAYLA
It was twilight, and the park was empty. That part was good. The solitude probably had more to do with the cold drizzle than the lack of sunlight, but it gave me free reign over what I was about to do.
I honestly couldn’t remember the last time I’d been here. As a little girl though, I’d come here all the time. My father pulled me down here several times each week in a big red plastic wagon, along with whatever toys and stuffed animals I decided were lucky enough to come play with me that day. As a result, it held bittersweet memories. But also the best memories of the very best times.
The rain intensified as I passed the playground, the nostalgia coalescing into a hot ball that sat heavily in the pit of my stomach. I saw the slides I used to climb backwards, the swings my father pushed me on. It seemed like yesterday I was a giggling six-year old, running around playing hide and seek with him. Hiding and then finding little colorful ‘treasures’ using hot and cold clues. Treasures that consisted of anything from pine-cones to figurines to little pieces of string.
I was eighteen when I graduated high school. I stayed in town attending community college, building up the credits I’d need to transfer to something bigger and better. I was working too. Saving money. After nearly two years of awkward fighting, Warren and Luke had moved away — each of them taking off in different directions to pursue their own academic goals.
And shortly after that, my whole world came crashing down.
It was a night like this one that the knock finally came. The police officers stood in my parent’s foyer, dripping rain on my parent’s floor. Only that night it became my floor, for a little while anyway. The night my parent’s Land Rover skidded off Route 204, bumping through a drainage ditch and then launching into a tree.
In the span of a single minute I was the last surviving member of my already small family. My mother’s flaky sister had moved away years ago. She didn’t even attend the funeral. My last surviving uncle had moved to the mountains, presumably to get away from civilization.
That left me… and a funeral to pay for. And a mortgage to figure out. And college tuition. And—
And lots of different things.
My legs took me away from the park, over a slight rise and into the field of bright green grass made slick by the rain. Here, my father and I had played soccer together. We’d thrown Frisbees and launched water rockets. Sometimes my mother had joined us, and those were my favorite times of all. But unlike my father, my mother wasn’t lucky enough to work from home. She saw a lot less of me, so the time we spent together was even more precious.
I walked some more, balancing the shovel over my shoulder. There was no one around. No one to question what I was doing, not that it mattered, not that—
There it is!
The bigleaf maple launched itself into the sky, looking every bit as huge and impressive as it had when I was a child. It stood at the far corner of the field, presiding over the only part of the park that