The drive home was a study in careful normalcy, Mom chattering about town news while Dad navigated streets I could have driven blindfolded.
And somewhere in this maze of familiar streets, Evan was living his life. Working, breathing, existing in the same space I'd abandoned like it meant nothing.
“Your room's just like you left it,” Mom said as we pulled into the driveway. “I changed the sheets yesterday, made sure everything was ready.”
Inside, the house smelled like coffee and cinnamon rolls, like Saturday mornings when the world was smaller and my biggest worry was whether I'd remembered to do my algebra homework. My feet found the familiar creaks in the hardwood floors, muscle memory guiding me up stairs that had witnessed a thousand teenage heartbreaks and triumphs.
My room felt like it was frozen in time like a museum exhibit dedicated to the boy I used to be. Movie posters on the walls, books stacked on the desk, camera equipment I'd deemed too amateur to take with me to my sophisticated new life.
And the photographs. Fuck, the photographs.
Every wall was covered with prints I'd made in high school, images of Hollow Pines seen through eighteen-year-old eyes that still believed the world was full of magic. The Old Mill shrouded in morning mist. Main Street during the winter festival, lanterns glowing like fairy lights. The forest at twilight, shadows that seemed to move when you weren't looking directly at them.
And Evan. There were so many pictures of Evan.
I'd tried to be subtle about it, tried to make it look like he just happened to be in frame when I was documenting other things. But looking at them now, the truth was painfully obvious.
I'd been documenting a love story that only one person knew was happening.
My hands shook as I set down my camera bag. Evan at seventeen, caught in profile during one of our walks to the forest. Evan at eighteen, graduation cap askew and that almost-smile playing around his mouth. Evan, Evan, Evan, like a prayer I'd been too cowardly to speak aloud.
“I'll let you get settled,” Mom said from the doorway. “Dinner's at six if you want to join us.”
I nodded, not trusting my voice to hold steady. When she was gone, I collapsed onto the bed and stared at the ceiling, trying to process the reality of being back in this room, this house, this town where every corner held memories I'd spent years trying to forget.
Chicago had been supposed to fix me. The University of Chicago photography program, internships with prestigious magazines, gallery showings that would make my name. Instead, I'd floundered through four years of college taking pictures that professors called “technically proficient but emotionally vacant,” words that would echo later in Marcus Rothstein's gallery like a prophecy I'd been too stupid to heed.
I'd managed two years in the city after graduation, scraping by on wedding gigs and stock photography, sharing a cramped apartment with three other aspiring artists who were all slowly coming to terms with the gap between dreams and reality. But it was that October afternoon in Rothstein's gallery that had finally broken something fundamental in me. Standing there while he dismissed my entire body of work as “pretty pictures with no heart”. Maybe I'd been chasing someone else's version of success so hard I'd forgotten what had made me pick up a camera in the first place.
When the lease ran out and I couldn't afford the rent increase, when my last client stiffed me on payment and my credit cards were maxed out, when I woke up one morning and realized I hadn't taken a single photograph in weeks that made me feel anything at all, I'd called Mom from the Greyhound station with Rothstein's words still ringing in my ears and asked if my room was still available.
The worst part? Part of me was relieved. All that time pretending I belonged in a city that never felt like home, swallowing my pride and my homesickness like bitter medicine, and all it had gotten me was a portfolio full of empty images and a heart that had forgotten how to feel wonder.
Maybe it was time to stop running from the one place that had ever made sense.
Dinner was an exercise in careful conversation, Mom and Dad asking safe questions about the bus ride and whether I wanted to borrow the car tomorrow, while I picked at Anna's famous pot roast and tried to pretend I wasn't falling apart from the inside out.
“So,” Mom said eventually, because Anna Harrington had never met a silence she couldn't fill with gentle curiosity. “Are you planning to stay for a while, or is this just a visit?”
“I don't know,” I said, which was the most honest thing I'd said since stepping off the bus. “I need to figure some things out.”
Dad set down his fork and looked at me with those steady eyes that had guided me through every crisis of my adolescence.
“There's no shame in coming home, Nate,” he said quietly. “Sometimes you have to go backward before you can go forward.”
“I'm not moving backward,” I said, defensive in the way that meant he'd hit too close to the truth. “I'm just... regrouping.”
“Of course you are,” Mom said, reaching across the table to squeeze my hand. “And we're glad you chose to do it here. This will always be your home, no matter where life takes you.”
The kindness in her voice made my throat tight. They weren't asking for explanations or apologies, weren't demanding to know why their successful photographer son had come home with his tail between his legs. They were just offering love, unconditional and patient.
“I didn't tell anyone I was coming back,” I said, because they deserved at least that much honesty. “I'm not ready for the whole town to know I'm here yet.”
Mom nodded like this made perfect sense. “Take all the time you need. When you're ready to let people know, they'll be here.”
But we all knew there was one person she was really talking about.
I wokethe next morning to birdsong and the smell of coffee drifting up from the kitchen, sensations so achingly familiar they made my chest tight with nostalgia. For a moment, I lay still and let myself pretend I was eighteen again, that the past six yearshad been nothing but a particularly vivid nightmare, that I could walk downstairs and find my whole life spread out in front of me like an unwritten story.
