Page 3 of Home to You
“You wanna eat?” I asked. Sometimes when Cole was nervous, food sat too heavy in his stomach, and he’d end up throwing up. I’d learned early on not to push.
Cole shrugged his bony shoulder, which I took as a yes. If he didn’t want food, he’d scrunch up his nose and actually tell me no.
He climbed up onto the barstool at the counter and started flipping through the dinosaur book he never left behind. His lips moved when he read, eyes scanning the page.
I cracked two eggs into a pan and grabbed a clean glass from the cabinet. “You nervous?”
He hesitated. Then nodded, just a slight bounce of his head.
“Remember, Buddy, this school’s different. Lots of other students like you.”
Around the time Cole started kindergarten, his mom noticed he could have trouble focusing if there were too many distractions. He was also slow to pick up letters and numbers. She’d had his vision tested, but that wasn’t the issue. After a lot of back and forth with his pediatrician and his school, Cole was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD.
Jenna and I had worked with his teacher and the district to get him on an IEP, but her death a couple of years ago had set him back. Making the situation even worse, around that time, some of his classmates started bullying him for his perceived weaknesses.
After a lengthy discussion with the principal, his teacher, and his intervention specialist that left me feeling like I wanted to put my fist through a wall, I decided to enroll him in Wild Ridge Academy, a progressive K–12 program that believed education should adapt to the student, not the other way around. My friend Tommy’s daughter went there and she loved it.
“What does that mean?” Cole asked, looking up from his book.
I set the plate of scrambled eggs down in front of him and handed him a fork. “Ones who think a bit differently … process things at their own clip, like you do. You’re gonna do real well, bud.”
His face flushed as he took a bite of his breakfast, but he didn’t say anything else. When his shoulders visibly relaxed, so did mine.
By the time we walked out of the house to hit the road, the sun was burning the fog off the pasture. Three Pines Ranch looked beautiful in the morning light—vast fields, low fences, the mountains in the distance rising up to meet the sky.
The ranch spanned nearly a thousand acres just outside Bridger Falls, a patchwork of pasture, scrubland, and timber that had been in my family for four generations. My great-granddad built the original barn with his own two hands. Every fence post, every trail through the hills—there was a story behind it. It was the kind of land that got in your blood. You didn’t just liveonit. You livedforit. I didn’t need much else in the world besides it, my brothers, and my kid.
Not anymore.
We drove the whole way into town with the windows cracked, silence sitting easy between us. Cole read his book, and I sipped from yetanothercup of coffee. Pulling up to the school and sliding into a parking spot next to a truck that could be my truck’s twin, I turned to Cole and asked, “You want me to walk in with you?”
At his age, I wouldn’t have wanted my parents to escort me into school, but I had to constantly remind myself that at his age, I was about three inches taller, ten pounds heavier, still had my mama, and wasn’t starting a new school.
“Would you?” he asked, his eyes shifting between me and the line of kids filing in with their parents … or in the case of some of them, their young nannies.
“Of course I will,” I said, pulling my gaze back to my son.
Once inside, the halls buzzed with typical first day of school energy—parents taking pictures of their kids, other kids chasing each other, staff trying to maintain order with cheerful voicesand genuine smiles. A woman I recognized as Principal Carol Connors waved us over.
“Good to see you again, Jake.”
“Hello, Carol,” I greeted her, rocking back on the heels of my boots. “Uh, I mean Mrs. Connors.” I scratched my temple, embarrassed over my slip.
The vibe at Wild Ridge was much more chill than Cole’s old school, but despite its many differences and relaxed approach to education, I still figured you should address the staff respectfully.
Carol—uh, Mrs. Connors—chuckled and waved away my obvious discomfort. “Just Carol’s fine.” She turned to my son. “You must be Cole. Welcome to Wild Ridge Academy. Your teacher should be out any second to greet you.”
That was another difference between Cole’s old school and here. With a ten-to-one student-to-teacher ratio, the teachers here had time to greet each of their students individually each morning. Cole’s last teacher had twenty more kids to wrangle, and there’d been a lot of shouting and clapping to try and get them wrangled for the day.
“Hi,” Cole said, clutching the straps of his backpack tightly.
I settled my hand on his shoulder and gave it a slight squeeze.
That was when I saw her—Eden Fucking James—walking toward us. My hand tightened on Cole’s shoulder—probably too tight, because he glanced up at me with a questioning look on his small face. I forced myself to relax my grip.
Christ. Ten years, and she still had the power to undo me completely.
I’d been running into Eden’s Aunt Mags around town for years, and every damn time, I’d spend the next couple of months stalking Eden’s Instagram like some lovesick teenager, torturing myself with glimpses of her life in Chicago. The sleek apartment.The polished husband with the smarmy smile. The dream career she’d chosen over me.
