Chapter 2: Chapter 1

My SUV bumped along 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. The me I’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 had once held my happiest memories. No. A place that still held 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.

I’d needed that numbness when I didn’t know where I’d end up. I’d needed it when I heard whispers about my burned flesh and dead family.

And just when I thought I would break, a miracle came.

In the form of the five-foot-two spitfire package of Nora Colson. Fallon’s mom. A woman who’d lost her husband and son years before and opened her home to children in need. I’d heard my mom say Nora took the tough cases that nobody wanted because the kids were too much work, and foster parents and social workers alike were already stretched too thin. But living with them, I saw it firsthand.

She’d demanded that I be placed with her, and the state listened. Because as tiny as Nora was, she had a fire that made others pay attention to whatever she had to say. So, I went to live with her, Fallon, and the rest of their patchwork family. And it made me one of the lucky ones. The luckiest.

The sound of gravel crunching had me turning around, away from the pull of the house that had once been a home. A familiar massive SUV barreled down the gravel road, not bothering to avoid the potholes.

I couldn’t help the grin that pulled at my lips. One of my brothers would have to take her vehicle into the shop for sure. My money was on Shep or Trace. Shepard always took ensuring everybody’s well-being on his shoulders. He was the ultimate caretaker. But Trace made sure everyone was safe and had since the state placed me with Nora. It made sense he’d ended up sheriff of the entire county.

The door to the SUV slammed, and Nora hurried toward me, light brown hair peppered with gray flying behind her. “I told you to wait for me, but when I got to your cottage, you were already gone.”

A hint of guilt swept through me at the true worry carving lines into her face. I grabbed her hand, squeezing it in reassurance. “I needed to stand on my own two feet.”

Nora’s green eyes swept over my face. The pass felt achingly familiar, something she’d done countless times. My mother had made it an art, too.

“There’s no rush,” Nora said carefully.

I winced. “Well, a new tenant is moving into the cottage on Monday, and Shep is set to start restoration work tomorrow, so I think the ball is rolling.”

“You can move back in with me and Lolli,” Nora said quickly. “We’ve got plenty of room.”

My lips twitched. Nora and her mother certainly did have space. The house I’d spent my teen years in was so large you needed a map to get around it. But it fit the land it had been built on—thousands of acres spread out as far as the eye could see.

“I think I’m a little old to move back home,” I chided.

She pulled me into a hug. “Never too old for that. Not ever.”

The ache intensified, a mixture of happy and sad, pleasure and pain. “Love you,” I whispered.

“More than there are stars in the sky,” Nora whispered back.

“Enough with the mushy stuff,” a female voice cut in, one that sounded like it smoked eight packs a day and followed them with a whiskey chaser. “I need you to help me hang my gift in the guesthouse.”

Nora released me, and we both turned to face the older woman standing in my drive. Lolli was dressed in a flowy maxi dress with more necklaces and bracelets than I could count, her gray hair tied up in a wild bun. She held something that sparkled in the sunlight—a canvas covered with hundreds of glittering stones.

“Mom,” Nora began.

“I’m thinking in the hallway as you come in,” Lolli interjected, then drummed her fingers on her lips. “No. Over your bed. What do you think, Rho?”

I stared hard at the result of Lolli’s newest hobby, diamond art. At first glance, it looked like some sort of flower you might find in the Amazon rainforest. But I knew better. I squinted and studied it harder.

Nora gasped to my right. “Mom! Tell me that isn’t a penis.”

I choked on a strangled laugh as the dick and balls came into focus. Lolli wasn’t happy with simple diamond art. She needed inappropriate gemstone creations.

Lolli arched a brow. “There’s no reason to be embarrassed about the human body. Our forms are what inspire the very best art.”

I rolled my lips over my teeth, trying to keep the worst of my laughter in.

“That may be true, but Rho can’t hang this in her home. Not where people will see,” Nora hissed.

Lolli straightened her shoulders and jutted her chin. “Would you tell that to The Met? The Louvre?”

Nora’s eyes narrowed on her. “I hate to break it to you, Mom, but you are not the Michelangelo of diamond art.”

I moved then, knowing we were about to descend into an argument we’d never get out of. Crossing to Lolli, I took the canvas from her hands. “I love my dick flower. I’ll hang it with pride.”

Nora let out a squeak, but Lolli just beamed. “Have I ever told you that you’re my favorite?”

I snorted. Lolli’s favorite changed daily, and it was a constant source of competition between our hodgepodge of found siblings. “You said it was Cope today. He sent you front-row tickets to his next game.”

Lolli drummed her fingers on her lips again. “True. I guess he does win. There’s just something about watching those brawny beefcakes smashing each other into the boards.”

Nora threw up her hands. “I give up.”

A laugh bubbled out of me, and, God, it felt good. The tiny expulsion of air released all the pent-up anxiety that had been stewing for weeks. I could do this. Because with as much as I’d been through, it only made me appreciate the good things in life. And there was so much good.

I wrapped an arm around Nora. “It’s better to just let Lolli have her way.”

“Damned straight,” Lolli said with a nod, making her vast array of necklaces jangle.

Nora simply shook her head and looked toward the small guesthouse to the right of the dilapidated main building. “The movers are already gone?”

I nodded. “Shep let them in this morning when he was here accepting a shipment of lumber. He said it only took them an hour.”

This time, Nora focused her disapproval on me. “You need to settle. Nest.”

I fought the urge to shift, or better yet, bolt. Nora was always on me to make my cottage more of a home. But it had seemed like a waste. It was a rental. Temporary. Why spend all that time and money to fix it up?

Not that money was an issue. My parents had left every single penny of their estate in a trust fund for Emilia and me. Since she was gone, too, all that had fallen to me. But this was the first time I’d touched it. Just thinking about it made me a little nauseous. Using the funds somehow felt like getting pleasure from my family’s deaths.

“Rho,” Nora whispered.

Her face came into focus in front of me, the gentle lines around her eyes and mouth that spoke of easy, frequent smiles. The green irises that held such gentleness. “The only thing they would want is for you to be happy.”

My throat burned as it worked to hold back a sob. “I know. But sometimes being happy feels like the worst betrayal of all.”

Nora pulled me into a tight hug, my ridiculous diamond art gift smooshed between us. “Never. Your happiness honors them. Because they taught you how to find the joy in every single day.”

I took a deep breath and slowly let out the air. As Nora released me, I tipped my face up to the sun. I let the rays beat down on me and remembered dancing through the sprinkler with Emilia on a day just like this one. I remembered plunging my hands into the dirt with my mom to put in new blooms. Remembered my dad chasing Em and me with a water gun. There was so much good here. So many memories to be grateful for.

A callused hand cupped my cheek, and I found Nora’s green eyes again. They shone with pride and a hint of some deeper emotion. “There she is.”

I took Nora’s hand and squeezed. “Come on. Let’s go hang my dick flower.”