The road narrowed as I left the highway, trees closing in on both sides. Fir and cedar crowded the shoulder, branches reaching overhead until the sky became something you caught in pieces. Water rushed somewhere nearby—one of the falls that cut through the hills outside town—loud enough to hear through the truck windows when I slowed for the curve. A few leaves had let go early and drifted across the road in front of me, the first gold ones, the ones that always went before the rest were ready.
Willowmist Falls announced itself quietly. No welcome sign worth mentioning. Just damp air, moss-dark rocks, and the sense that the land had decided where everything belonged long before anyone built houses on it. The roads twisted tighter the farther in I went, familiar turns pulling memories up whether I wanted them or not.
I turned down my parents’ street, the forest thinning just enough to make space for lawns and driveways, and pulled into the gravel drive I’d known by heart since I was a kid. The house looked exactly the same. Same pale siding. Same porch light that clicked on a second before I reached the steps, like it had been waiting. A pot of mums sat beside the front door, deep yellow, the kind my mother put out every year without fail when the air started turning. The place sat back from the road, tidy and well cared for, the type of home that suggested nothing bad ever happened there—and if it did, it got smoothed over quickly with hardly a mention.
I shut off the engine and sat for a moment longer than necessary, hands resting on the steering wheel. The windows glowed warm, shadows moving inside. Laughter drifted out when someone opened the door.
I hadn’t knocked yet, but the door swung open anyway, and my mom was there, her face lighting up the second she saw me. “Jasper,” she said, like my name still surprised her. She crossed the porch in two steps and pulled me into a hug that smelled like laundry soap and dinner. “You made it.”
“I said I would,” I murmured, even as I hugged her back.
She stepped away just long enough to look me over, eyes flicking—too quickly—to my knee. “How’s it feeling?”
“Still attached,” I said.
She smiled, disbelieving but choosing to let it go. Then she reached up and pressed her palm against my cheek for just a second—not checking anything, not asking anything. Just making sure I was real. She dropped her hand before I could react and turned back toward the door. “Come in. You’re just in time.”
Inside, the house closed around me immediately. Warm air. Familiar furniture. The low hum of voices from the dining room. My dad looked up from the table when I walked in, nodding once—pride and relief wrapped up in a single gesture. We made a matched set, the Deans. Same dark hair, same hazel eyes, the same jaw I’d been looking at in the mirror my whole life, now looking back at me across the table. It was impossible not to see where I came from, even after all this time.
“Son. Glad you came.”
“Hey, Dad.”
Connor stood and clapped a hand on my shoulder, solid and easy. “There he is.”
Hannah slipped in beside me and bumped my arm lightly with her own. “You almost didn’t,” she said under her breath. “I could feel the excuses forming in your brain all the way from here.”
“And yet, here I am,” I replied.
She studied me for half a second, eyes sharp, then smiled like she’d come back to it later.
Plates were already set. Food crowded the table—too much of it. My mom’s way of making sure no one was left hungry or unsettled. I took my seat, and she piled my plate like I was seventeen again. Extra potatoes. Extra meat. A spoonful of spinach, she knew I hated, but had always insisted it would make me grow up strong.
“You’re too thin,” she said, as if it were her moral failing.
I didn’t argue. It was easier to let her feed the version of me she still saw.
Connor asked about the bar. Mom asked about my knee again. I answered what I could and deflected the rest. My dad sat quietly, eyes fixed on his plate, nodding at the right moments. He laughed when someone looked directly at him, like he needed permission. He didn’t say much otherwise.
There was a time—before the layoff, before the drinking, before everything fell apart—when he filled rooms without trying. I used to love being around him then, certain nothing could knock him off balance. He was working again now. Sober. Reliable, apparently. The old him, or close enough.
Time had moved on for the Deans. Everyone seemed to be fine.
I was the one who couldn’t shake the memories.
I remembered what it had been like in the years before I enlisted—the way the house changed shape around his moods, the silence that meant he’d been drinking since noon, the way my mom would find small tasks to busy herself with in whatever room he wasn’t in. Connor had been nineteen, already out of the house and at college, far enough away to have some distance from it. Hannah had been fourteen and not far enough away at all. I’d been seventeen and old enough to understand what was happening and young enough that understanding it hadn’tgiven me any tools to fix it. I’d tried for a while—coming home straight after school, staying close, making myself useful. As if my presence alone might hold something together. Nothing I did had made any difference, and somewhere in that long, grinding year I’d made a decision I’d never said out loud to anyone: I needed to get out. Not because I didn’t love them. Because I was drowning alongside them and I couldn’t see another way.
Enlisting had given me a door, and I’d walked through it, and I’d told myself they’d be okay, that my mom was strong, that Hannah was resilient. I’d told myself a lot of things on that bus out of Honeybrook Hollow at eighteen. Some of them had even been true. My dad had eventually gotten sober—not right away, not for years, but eventually.
But I hadn’t been there for any of it. Not for the worst of it, and not for the slow climb back out either. Connor had come home from college when things got bad enough, had apparently shown up one winter and just stayed, taken a job in town, and helped my mom keep the lights on and our father steady. I’d gotten letters about it. Phone calls I hadn’t always answered because hearing about it from a distance was easier than sitting inside it. That was the part I couldn’t make peace with—not that I’d left, but that Connor had come back and I hadn’t, and nobody had ever said a word about it to me directly, which was almost worse than if they had.
All the while, a different image sat just under the surface—Cara at the bookstore window, sunlight on the glass, her smile slow and surprised. The contrast pressed in on me, sharp enough to notice.
I’d left Willowmist Falls once to breathe. Now I was here again, wondering what it would cost me this time.
Dinner wound down slowly. Plates were cleared, leftovers packed with unnecessary ceremony. My mom insisted I take a container home. My dad retreated to the living room, my motherand Connor followed, the low murmur of sports commentary filling the space they’d claimed.
I lingered at the sink, rinsing my plate, giving myself something to do with my hands.
