"I should've come home more often," I said.
Dad was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "You're here now."
He was right. I hadn’t meant to land here, but here was where the landing felt soft.
"Yeah." I looked at him across the table. "I am."
CHAPTER 16: MATT
Idrove without thinking, without planning, just following the roads I'd known my whole life until I found myself turning onto Maple Street.
My parents' house sat three blocks from the center of town, same white ranch they'd lived in since before I was born. The porch light was on. That was Mom's thing, leaving it burning for whoever might need to find their way home. I used to think it was for me, back when I was a teenager stumbling in past curfew. Now I knew it was just habit. A light burning for ghosts and memories and sons who'd stopped needing it years ago.
I pulled over a house down from theirs and killed the engine. I sat there in the dark, looking at the warm glow of the kitchen window.
I could see them through the glass. Mom at the sink, washing dishes, her gray hair pulled back the way she always wore it. Dad stood beside her with a dishtowel, drying as she handed them over. I could see their mouths moving, see the way Mom laughed at something Dad said and nudged him with her elbow. Fifty years of marriage and they still stood close enough to touch while they did the dishes.
My chest tightened.
I wanted to go inside, to walk through that door and sit at their kitchen table and tell them everything. Have Mom make tea and Dad sit there quiet and steady while I fell apart and tried to figure out how to put myself back together.
But I couldn't.
Because they'd ask what happened, and I'd have to tell them. And then they'd know what kind of man their son had become.
The man who cheated on his wife and threw away eight years for nothing. The man who showed up on his in-laws' porch and got a shotgun pointed at him because that's what he deserved.
They'd find out eventually.
Small towns didn't keep secrets—someone would tell someone who'd tell someone else, and within a week the whole of Millbrook would know that Matt Hale had fucked around and lost everything. My mother would hear it at the grocery store or the post office. My father would get it from one of his buddies at the VFW. And they'd have to carry that, have to smile and nod and pretend it didn't break their hearts that their son had turned out to be exactly the kind of man they'd taught him not to be.
But not tonight.
Tonight, they could stand in their kitchen and do the dishes and laugh at whatever small joke had passed between them. Tonight, they could still be proud of me, or at least not ashamed.
I watched Dad set down the dishtowel and pull Mom close, kissing the top of her head. She leaned into him the way people do when they've been together so long that touching is as natural as breathing. Easy and effortless, the type of love that doesn't require grand gestures or second chances because it never needed them in the first place.
That's what I'd had with Elena. Or what I thought I'd had, anyway. What I could have kept if I hadn't been so goddamn stupid.
My throat closed up. I put the car in drive and pulled away before they could look out the window and see me sitting there in the dark like some kind of ghost haunting his own life.
Soon enough, the highway stretched out empty ahead of me. I didn't bother with the radio.
My phone buzzed a few times on the passenger seat. I glanced at it once, noticed Angela's name on the screen, and turned it facedown. I’d been avoiding her calls for days. Tonight wasn’t going to be the exception.
It waspast midnight when I pulled into the driveway.
The house was dark, and for a moment I just sat there in the car, engine ticking as it cooled, staring at the front door. The yellow tulips in the vase on the kitchen table would still be there, as would the sheets I'd washed three times. Everything still in its place, like the whole house had frozen in time.
But time was still moving, whether I wanted it to or not, and when the divorce papers came—and theywouldcome—I'd lose this too. The house, the life, all of it.
I got out, locked the car, and started up the walk.
That's when I saw her.
Angela was sitting on the front steps, knees pulled up to her chest, head resting against the railing. Her hair was a mess, makeup smudged, and even from here I could tell she'd been drinking. A purse sat beside her, contents half-spilled onto the concrete.
She looked up when she heard me coming and tried to smile. It came out wrong, lopsided and sad.
