Page 3 of The Embers That Remain

And beneath everything was him. The suffocating memories I wished I could bleach from my mind. Tear up by the roots and make them disappear completely. I shut that door in my mind before it could open too far. Before it could reignite. The pain it caused was too much.

“You’re thirty-two years old, Cali,” I whispered, gripping the steering wheel until my fingers ached. “You’ve survived worse than this. You can do hard things.” The words sounded hollow in the quiet car. They didn’t feel true, but if you said something enough, you would learn to believe it. I hadn’t come back for closure, or to reopen old wounds, or rewrite history. I’d come back because love demanded it.

And love had always been the most reckless thing I’d ever felt.

From where I sat, I could see the football field stretching out under the afternoon sun. The bleachers loomed to the side, empty now, but I could already imagine them filled with voices rising and falling, judgment passed in under-their-breath whispers or in silence alike. I told myself I was here for Grandpa. Only Grandpa.

But my eyes drifted toward the stately limestone school anyway, toward the doors I’d walked through countless times before, the offices tucked just inside and a past I’d outrun for fifteen years and somehow never quite escaped. I wondered how often he was in town. Probably not too much, considering he probably lived in some mansion with one of the supermodels that often adorned his arm. The thought slipped in uninvited, settling heavy in my chest.

Fifteen years was a long time.

Long enough to build a life. Long enough to lose pieces of yourself and learn how to function without them. Long enough to accommodate a limp without even realizing it was there. Deciding to support an ingrained habit without taking into consideration that it was past time to move forward. Long enough to convince yourself that certain chapters were closed for good.

I’d been so sure I could do this: come back, keep my head down, take care of what needed taking care of, and exist without reopening wounds that had never really healed. But sitting there, watching my son step onto the same football field where so much of my life had fractured, I wasn’t so sure. At six o’clock, I told myself, I’d pick him up. Until then, I would breathe. Just enough until I decided if I had any other options. Damn love and the things it made you do.

Two

Cali

Ididn’t realize my hands were strangling the steering wheel until my palms ached from the pressure. The house sat at the end of the gravel drive, almost unrecognizable, two stories of white paint gone chalky and thin, boards swelling where rain had gotten in. One gutter drooped as if it had given up the fight years ago. A crack glinted from a porch window, spidering outward, catching the late-afternoon sun in sharp glimmers of light. This place used to shine with care, never flashy but always well maintained.

I remembered it standing proud, flower beds edged just so, my grandmother’s roses climbing and spilling in puddles of blooms as if they had something to prove to every other gardener around. Now weeds choked the dirt where she’d once knelt with her soil-covered gloves and her quiet humming of hymns. The air smelled like soil and freshly mowed grass, which made little sense with everything I’d been told. My heart squeezed at the sight.

Fifteen years. That’s how long it had been since I’d stepped through that front door. It’d been two years since I’d last seen my grandfather, meeting in Kansas City because I was unwilling to get any closer, like the town of Kennedy itself had something contagious. I’d hugged him too fast and kept my smile too fixed. Promised I’d visit soon, but soon never came.

“Yo, Cal.” Jace’s voice snapped through the quiet like a rubber band against skin.

“Are you going to get out, or are we just gonna sit and stare at the haunted house all night?”

I let out a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh and nudged his shoulder. “I hear the ghosts here prefer teenagers. Keeps them entertained.”

He snorted, but his eyes stayed on the house, sharp, curious, cataloging everything. Jace was always watching. He’d learned that before we met, before paperwork and courtrooms and signatures that didn’t feel big enough to explain that he meant everything to me.

I pushed the driver’s door open and climbed out on jelly legs. Gravel crunched under my shoes, loud in the open space. Jace popped up over the roof of my car—Brenda—which had seen better days and was currently packed to the ceiling with everything we owned. Boxes, duffel bags, a milk crate full of Jace’s comic books. The back seat sagged under the weight of our lives.

Everything we could take with us that didn’t need to be sold.

The nausea crept in, acidic and familiar. I swallowed it back and focused on the kid standing beside me, too tall for his age, dark hair falling into his eyes no matter how many times I told him he needed a trim. He leaned against the car, trying to appear relaxed, but the tension in his shoulders betrayed him.

This was my fault.

I’d promised him security. A home. A future that didn’t feel like instability. I’d said a lot of things before I learned how quickly they could be taken, and I’d let Brett have everything just so that I could have Jace.

The colonial house with the enormous windows on the family-friendly cul-de-sac and the new car that still smelled like expensive leather and fresh possibilities, along with the ring I’d worn for less than six months. People wanted to hear a version of the story where he was blindsided, broken, and brave for surviving me. Survive the fact that I wouldn’t let a child end up in the system when there was a possibility of a kinship placement. If they only knew all the things I did. The recklessness. The debt. The pills. The things I’d kept quiet. How he’d gone from being a stable hero to becoming someone I didn’t want to know. He was loud, charming, and easy to believe.

I was the one who didn’t fight back, and I hated the part of me that never found the courage to.

That had always been my specialty: staying small, smoothing edges, asking questions instead of answering them. One of my instructors once called it a gift, the way people opened up around me. She didn’t know it was just practice. A lifetime of redirecting attention away from myself somehow translated into the gift of a great bedside manner.

When you stayed on the surface, no one noticed how deep the fissures went. You didn’t have to explain dysfunctional family dynamics if you kept people talking about themselves long enough that they forgot their interest in knowing anything about you.

The oak tree beside the house cast a wide shadow across the porch. I stopped beneath it and really looked, the way I’d been avoiding since the drive ended. The place had aged hard. Sagged in places it never had before. Grandpa had always prided himself on everything being nice, even when money was thin. I could remember him repeatedly telling me to “always leave things better than you found them.” We never went hungry, but Grandpa’s clothes were mended until they were threadbare. Grandma had been clever like that, making things last and using a handful of ingredients to make a filling meal.

The grass was cut, but the flowers were a chaotic mess of blooms and weeds. I tipped my head to the side, taking it in. It was an odd contradiction that was unsettling.

Jace followed my gaze, his mouth tugging down just slightly. “So,” he said, quieter now. “This is home?”

The word felt foreign because this wasn’t the home I remembered growing up in.