Chapter 3
The lamp by the couch clicked on by itself, and warm gold light flooded across my face so fast I froze mid-breath, my hand still on the knob, my duffel strap sliding off my shoulder. I stood absolutely still, staring through the doorway at a room that was spotless. Lived-in. Cared for. Fresh firewood stacked in neat rows beside a stone fireplace that had clearly burned within the last day.
Somebody had been keeping this place alive.
I stepped inside slowly, my palm brushing the clean wooden wall as if touching it would prove it was real. My eyes moved across the room and landed on a framed black-and-white photograph propped on the mantle.
I crossed the floor and picked it up with hands that were not as steady as thirteen years of combat training should have made them.
It was my father. Barely twenty, standing in front of this exact cabin, beside an elderly woman I had never once seen in my life. On the back, in his handwriting, six words.
With Grandma Adelaide, where everything began.
My father had told us for thirty-one years that there was no one left. No grandparents. No history before him. Just him, then us, then whatever future Skylar was busy decorating with marble countertops.
I was still staring at that photograph, at Adelaide's sharp, knowing eyes staring back at me across seven decades, when a firm knock sounded behind me.
I turned fast, instinct before thought, and found an older man standing on the porch in the blue Ozark dusk, holding a covered dish, his posture straight as a flagpole even though he had to be pushing eighty.
"Hank McCoy," he said. "Retired Marine Corps. Your father asked me to come by when the light turned on."
May you like
I didn't move. "The light turned on by itself."
"I know," Hank said, and something gentle passed over his weathered face, the look of a man who'd been waiting a long time to finally say what came next. "That's how he set it up. Solar timer, motion sensor, the whole rig, wired eleven years ago. He said the day this cabin lit up on its own again, it meant you'd finally come home to claim it. And that when it did, I was to walk up here and tell you the truth he never could."
