Page 1 of The Way Back Home

PROLOGUE

August

“MR. COTTON, ARE YOUthere?” Mr. White asks. I press the receiver closer to my ear to drown out the noise of the bar around me. It’s too loud. Everything is too loud after the stillness of the woods. The speaker crackles, echoing the panic I feel inside. I wanna leave. I wanna walk out the door and disappear, melt back into the trees and vanish. Instead, I rake my hands through greasy hair and lean against the wood-paneled wall. Three hundred miles. I’d been three hundred miles away from home when it happened. “Mr. Cotton?”

I scrub my hand down over my face and bushy beard. I sure could use a shower, a shave, and a decent night’s sleep.Sleep. Shit, I ain’t done much of that since I signed up for the Corps. “Yeah. I’m here.”

“I’m sorry to do this over the phone. Your parents were good people,” Mr. White says. “They were well respected in this town, and they are sorely missed by everyone.”

“Where was Bettina at the time?”

“She was in the vehicle. She’s alright now—a little banged up, and a broken wrist, but nothing she won’t heal from.”

I glance around the bar. A woman with teased blond hair and a tight animal print dress occupies a stool a few feet away. Her mascara is clumped on so thick it’s as if spiders are nesting beneath her eyelids. Red lipstick bleeds onto the butt of the cigarette, and I close my eyes, trying to erase the image of blood splattered on the desert floor. The first strains of Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces” blare from the jukebox, and it all feels like some cruel joke. “Where is she?”

“Miss Cotton is in the custody of the State. You should know, your parents expressed their wishes that you be her legal guardian in the event of their passing.”

“What?” I stiffen. My ears ring. The music grows louder, and I stare at the peeling laminate on the bar, uncertain I heard him right.

“You need to come home, August. There are affairs to put in order. The coroner has held off from the funeral as long as he’s willing to, but as you know, ours is a small town and there isn’t a heck of a lotta room in the morgue.”

The morgue. How many times did I picture my parents visiting me there on a cold metal slab? Yet here I am, somewhere outside of Bear Creek, wearing my shoes through with the miles I walk every day, completely unaware that my parents lay cold and lifeless in a fucking refrigerator for a week while my baby sister is in the custody of the State. “August?”

“Yeah, I heard you.”

“If money is a problem I can wire you the funds for a bus ticket.”

“No,” I say sharply. I don’t like handouts, and I don’t like being underestimated. “I got it.”

“You’ll come home,” Mr. White says. It ain’t a question.

Home. Why did my blood turn to ice at the thought of that one word?Home. One word, four little letters, and a shit-ton of regret.

This morning I’d been excited at the prospect of a hot meal and a real bed, and within seconds, my whole world’s been turned upside down. My parents are dead. My little sister needs me, and I am going home to Magnolia Springs—the one place I swore I’d never return to.

I don’t know the first thing about being a parent. Hell, I’m not even a fucking grown-up most days. I served one tour in Afghanistan—eight months of hell. I didn’t even make it a whole tour before I got myself blown up, and I returned home an echo of my former self. I can’t deal with crowds, I can’t deal with people—even my own mother’s pity had been too much for me, and the second my body had healed, I’d been outta that town like a shot. The dust hadn’t even settled on my pack. If I hadn’t been ripped apart by an IED, I’d have signed up for my next deployment and lost myself in another battlefield, but they don’t take invalids in the Marines. I’d been honorably discharged, and it had been a punishment worse than any we could inflict on our enemies because I’d wanted to die a hero, and instead I was living life as a cripple.

Now my parents were dead, and I was going home. Stepping into someone else’s life to take care of my sister, as if I could ever fill their shoes. As if I could ever be anything more than broken.

---