Page 66 of Until We Come Home

“I love you too, Derek,” I say, the familiar response slipping out automatically.

“So?” he asks. “What do you say? Give us another real shot?”

I sit there, trapped between the safe choice and the truth, my stomach twisting into knots.

“Yeah,” I say. “Let’s give it another shot.”

CHAPTER 17

Mateo

Boston

Our house is tucked onto a narrow street, a modest place with two small bedrooms and a kitchen she painted a cheerful yellow the month I left for the academy. It was always just the two of us growing up, scraping by on her nurse’s salary.

It’s only late morning and Mom’s still on shift at the hospital, so I wander through the quiet house with my coffee, pausing to glance over the photo wall in the hallway.

A picture of Lindsey and me catches me first, the two of us on this same back porch the summer before everything. I swallow and move my eyes along to the others instead. My great-grandparents outside their house in Seville, taken on one of our visits when I was a kid, me squinting between them in a Red Sox cap.

We could rarely afford much. But every few years she’d pick up enough overtime to fly us over to see them, and those trips were the only vacations we ever took. The rest of the wall is the two of us, family friends who stood in for the relatives we didn’t have, Boston in every season, a dozen Christmases.

The gaps are there too, though probably only to me. No photos of my father. None of my grandparents. Good riddance to both.

My grandparents emigrated from Spain when my grandfather got a medical residency in Boston, wealthy and traditional, and when their nineteen-year-old daughter got pregnant and the father wasn’t in the picture, they effectively disowned her. We haven’t spoken to them in decades.

Still, we did just fine, her and me, listening to old records while the radiator clanked in the corner. Meeting my dad as an adult was a giant disappointment, and I cut him out of my life after one attempt to reconnect. Calvin gave it a few more tries than I did before he landed in the same place.

I head down the hall, trying not to look at the one of Lindsey and me on the courthouse steps on our wedding day. The steps leading down to my mom’s back yard have been loose since my high school days. She’s spent the last decade claiming she’d hire a contractor to fix them, so I grab her old toolbox from beneath the sink and step outside to handle it myself.

The porch out back leads down to a tiny square patch of lawn, a rusty clothesline, and the raised garden bed where she keeps her beloved heirloom tomatoes.

I drop onto one knee and start backing out the rusted screws, trying to ignore the pain in my ribs every time I lean forward, alongside the dull ache lingering behind my eyes from the concussion.

Even though it’s nearly September, Boston is stifling, and I can hear somebody’s radio drifting over from two yards down. But it’s nice being back home. I didn’t know how much I’d missed it until I got here.

Between my family in Dark River, my crew at Station 7, and the endless green of the Pacific Northwest, the West Coast has claimed a huge part of my life. I find myself spending more time out there every year. But Boston is still in my blood, and no matter how far I run, it’s always going to be home.

“Mateo!” my mother’s voice calls out through the screen door. “What on earth are you doing down there? You have three cracked ribs, you’re supposed to be resting!”

I snort and keep working at the wooden riser. “Since when do you care about a little rest?”

She comes out onto the top step, still in her scrubs from the night shift, arms crossed, shaking her head at me. Her black hair is pulled back and shot through with gray now, and despite just finishing a long shift, she still looks like she’s ready to go another twelve if someone needs her to.

“Since always,” she says. “In case you forgot, I’m a nurse, you dolt.”

“Yeah,” I tell her, looking up with a grin. “Which meant growing up, the standard medical advice around here was ‘you’re fine, take an Advil and walk it off.’”

People always assume having a nurse for a mother meant I got fussed over, but it went the other way. She’d seen what an actual emergency looked like, so nothing short of a bone through the skin ever rated a trip to the hospital in this house. I’d bet money I could break my arm in front of her right now and she’d tell me it was probably a sprain and to go put some ice on it.

“I will not be spoken to like this on my own porch,” she says, though I catch the tiny twitch at the corner of her mouth.

“Uh-huh,” I say, turning the screw another quarter inch. “I must have imagined it all, including the time you sent me to school with a sprained wrist and a bag of frozen peas. And I’m being careful, don’t worry. It’s just some cracked ribs, it’s not a big deal.”

“Your stubbornness is going to be the death of me, you know that?” she mutters, though there’s no real bite to it.

“Well, I learned from the absolute master,” I say, smiling up at her. “Besides, if I don’t fix this, you’re going to break your neck coming down for tomatoes.”

She sighs, resting her hands on her hips as she looks down at me. “Did you stop by the station yet to see the guys?”