Page 11 of Forever Dark
That got a real laugh out of Selena, brief but genuine.
It faded fast as she took the paper from Meg.
“Go to this place,” Meg said.“Help how you can.Then come back better for it.”
Selena glanced once more at the photos inside the folder.Church stone.Candle wax.The dead woman’s folded hands.Beneath the clean lines of report language and the professional detachment she wore like skin, something older had begun to stir.Not fear exactly.Not even dread.More like a seam she had spent years keeping sealed had been touched and found weaker than she’d believed.
Meg’s voice softened a notch, which for her was practically tenderness.“Look at it this way.It’s a good way to reconnect with your past for a few weeks and catch up with people you haven’t seen for years.”
Selena closed the folder.
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
CHAPTER TWO
By the time Selena left the interstate behind, she felt scraped raw.
Seven hours in the air had done that on its own.Seven hours beside a man in a golf shirt who had dropped potato chip crumbs all down his front in the first twenty minutes, then spent the rest of the flight snoring through his mouth while he slept in short, foul bursts.Add two hours of airport lines, a bland coffee that tasted burned, and the car rental clerk who had insisted on calling her ma’am every other sentence, and the trip had become less a journey than a slow punishment.
Now she drove through the dark with both hands on the wheel and her shoulders knotted tight.This was a drive into both unknown and known territories.A place she’d grown up in, but a place she had left behind a long time ago.She wondered just how much it might have changed.
The road narrowed as it wound deeper into Harlan County.Hills rose on either side in uneven black shapes.Trees crowded the edges, their branches bent and twisted in the headlights until they looked like crooked hands reaching in from the ditches.The beams swept over guardrails, reflectors, leaning fence posts, and mailboxes planted far apart from one another like warnings.
Nothing out there had changed enough.
That was the first thought that bothered her.
She had been telling herself all day that fifteen years was a long time.Long enough for roads to feel smaller, for buildings to come down, for memory to lose its grip on a place.Long enough for Harlan County to become just another point on a map she used to know.
Instead, the dark outside the windshield kept proving how little distance mattered once the land itself started recognizing you.
A bend in the road brought a narrow bridge into view.Selena crossed it, listening to the tires scuff over old planks beneath the asphalt overlay, and thought of her father’s truck rattling over the same bridge years ago with feed in the back and dirt on the floorboards.Things seemed so easy back then.So simple.
Then came an image of her sister.
That thought arrived with less warmth.
Selena knew exactly how that conversation would go if she spoke with Diane tonight.First surprise.Then anger dressed up as concern.Then the questions.
When did you get in?
How long are you staying?
Why didn’t you tell us sooner?
Why haven’t you called in months?
All fair questions.
That didn’t make her want to answer them.The truth was, Selena had built a new identity for herself; a competent, some would say talented, FBI agent.That job had taken over and become who she was.But her family, her old friends?Selena wasn’t sure they’d accept this other version of the little girl they’d seen grow up.The little girl who was scared of the dark.The little girl who always doubted herself.Those doubts were still there, swirling around inside.Selena had only learned to hide them better.Somewhere in the back of her mind, there was a fear that returning to her home county would somehow tear down this newer version, leaving the old wounds, the old uncertainties, exposed for all to see.
Selena had decided to minimize her contact with family and friends.In and out.Get the job done and get back to her life in DC.The life she had fought so hard for.She had no intention of staying with family while she was on this case.Not with her father’s judgmental ways, not with her sister watching everything she said for signs that she might vanish again the second it was convenient.Selena did not have the energy for explanations.Not tonight.Maybe not ever.She wasn’t even sure what those explanations were.When she left Harlan County at twenty-five, she left it with both hands on the wheel.She had built a life elsewhere and taught herself not to look back too often.The rearview window held only pain and regret.
Now here she was, driving straight into the middle of it.The center of her previous life.All because she was being punished for ruffling political feathers in Washington.It just didn’t seem fair.
A strange pressure gathered in her chest.
She hadn’t expected that part.Irritation, yes.Resistance, certainly.But not this creeping unease that seemed to rise from the dark, twisted roads themselves.No good would come from old reunions.Family had history.History meant obligations.Obligations meant stories people thought they were owed.
