Page 6 of Forever Gone

Morning sunlight lay across the quiet street, warming the brick fronts and clipped lawns. A delivery van idled two houses down while a driver carried a parcel toward a porch. Somewhere nearby, a mower started, coughed, then settled into a steady growl.

Robert’s white-sided house had changed little since Connor first walked up its path as a teenager. The porch still sagged slightly at the left corner. The brass numbers beside the door had darkened with age. Two wooden planters sat beneath the front windows, though whatever Robert’s daughter Diane had planted in them had begun to surrender to the first cool nights of fall.

Connor pulled in behind Robert’s pickup and checked the driveway.

No sign of Selena’s dark sedan.

He checked the curb as well, then the narrow space beside the garage.

Her car was not there.

Relief came so quickly it irritated him.

He shut off the engine and remained behind the wheel for a moment, one hand resting on the brim of his hat. Since Selena moved back to Harlan County, Connor had seen her twice outside the station and once across Main Street, where both of them had pretended not to notice the other until pretending became more obvious than a greeting would have been.

He had told himself he was giving her room.

The excuse had worked better before he started avoiding her father’s house.

Connor stepped from the SUV and closed the door. The morning carried a mild chill, not cold yet, but cool enough to sharpen the scent of cut grass and dry leaves. A maple near the sidewalk had begun dropping red along its upper branches. One leaf had settled on the hood of Robert’s truck.

The front door opened before Connor reached the porch.

Diane Raven stood behind the screen, wearing jeans and a loose gray sweater. Her dark hair was tied back, and a dish towel hung over one shoulder. She studied him through the mesh with an expression that suggested his arrival had interrupted something important, though Diane could convey that while doing nothing at all.

“Morning, Chase.”

Connor tipped his hat. “Morning, Diane.”

She opened the screen door and stepped aside.

Connor placed one boot across the threshold.

“Mind your manners,” Diane said. “Take your hat off.”

He stopped and glanced up at the brim as if he had forgotten it was there. Then he removed it.

“Are all the women in the Raven family going to tell me what to do?”

A small laugh escaped him, but Diane rolled her eyes.

“Don’t bring my sister into it.”

Connor's smile faded before he could prevent it. Diane and Selena had not spoken for a long time. Not since Robert's serious illness, when the two sisters had fallen out over how best to care for him. Thankfully, he was doing better now, but even though he had healed, the rift between his daughters had not.

Diane turned toward the hallway. “Dad’s in the back room. He’s just had breakfast.”

“Thanks.”

The house held the familiar warmth of a place that had been lived in for decades. Framed family photographs covered the wall beside the stairs. Selena and Diane as children, standing on either side of Robert at a county fair. Selena in her graduation gown. Diane in a graduation gown. A younger Robert beside the girls’ mother, both of them laughing at something beyond the frame.

Connor kept moving.

He had appeared in some of those pictures once. Not on this wall, but in albums Robert stored in the cabinet beneath the television. Wedding photographs. Christmas mornings. Cookouts in the rear yard. Years reduced to glossy squares that no one knew whether to display or throw away.

The hallway opened into a back room with windows overlooking the yard. Robert sat in a padded chair near the glass, a folded newspaper on his lap. A breakfast tray rested on the side table beside him, holding an empty plate and a glass of orange juice.

Robert’s hair was thinning, and he wasn’t quite the imposing figure he once was, but age had not ground him down just yet, despite a few previous years of ill health. Ill health that had left his face more jagged than it had been in the past. Ill health that had taken some of his energy and weight. Ill health that had split his daughters from each other; a rift that was rarely spoken of, but felt like trench warfare; Robert perpetually existing in the no-man’s land between.