Then reality crashed back in, and I remembered that I was twenty-four and broke and had no idea what I was supposed to do next.
I pulled on jeans and a flannel shirt that had probably belonged to my high school self, laced up boots that were meant for forest trails instead of city streets, and slung my camera bag over my shoulder like armor against whatever the day might bring.
Downstairs, Mom was humming over scrambled eggs while Dad read the local paper. They looked up when I appeared, faces bright with the particular joy parents reserved for mornings when their children were home and safe and eating breakfast at the kitchen table.
“Sleep well?” Mom asked, setting a plate in front of me that was loaded with enough food to feed a small army.
“Yeah,” I lied, because admitting I'd spent most of the night staring at photographs of a boy I'd loved from a distance would only worry them. “I thought I'd walk around town today, see what's changed.”
“Not much,” Dad said with a grunt. “Hollow Pines isn't exactly a hotbed of rapid development.”
“That's what I'm counting on,” I said, and meant it.
Outside, I'd forgotten how quiet mornings could be without the constant hum of traffic, how the light looked different when it filtered through trees instead of reflecting off glass and steel.
I walked slowly through streets that existed more in memory than reality, camera hanging around my neck like a talisman. The Moonbeam Café glowed with warm light, Martha was visible through the window as she wiped down tables and prepared for the morning rush. The library looked exactly the same, ivy stillcrawling up the brick walls like nature was trying to reclaim civilization one building at a time.
And there, at the end of Main Street where the pavement gave way to forest trails, stood the weathered sign that marked the entrance to Evernight Forest. The place where I'd followed Evan on countless afternoons, where he'd shown me secrets I'd never understood and shared silences that had meant more than any conversation.
I lifted my camera and snapped a few shots, muscle memory guiding my hands through settings and compositions. The light was perfect, golden and soft, turning the ordinary into something that looked almost magical. For the first time in months, taking pictures felt like breathing instead of drowning.
I spent the morning wandering through Hollow Pines with my camera, rediscovering the town through older eyes that had seen too much and come home empty-handed. Everything was smaller than I remembered, more intimate, like a dollhouse version of the place that had seemed so vast when I was young.
But it was still beautiful. Still worth documenting, still full of stories that deserved to be told. The way morning light hit the courthouse steps, transforming mundane civic architecture into something that looked like art. The flower boxes outside Finley's shop, bursting with late summer blooms that somehow managed to look both wild and carefully tended. The shadows that moved between the trees at the forest's edge, probably just wind but maybe something more.
By the time I made it back to the house, the sun was high overhead and my camera was full of images that actually mattered, pictures that said something about the place they'd been taken instead of just documenting that it existed.
“Find anything interesting?” Mom asked as I kicked off my boots in the mudroom.
“Yeah,” I said, surprised to discover it was true. “I think I did.”
That night, I uploaded the day's photos to my laptop and spent hours in careful post-processing, adjusting light and shadow until each image said exactly what I wanted it to say. It was the most productive I'd been in months, the closest I'd felt to being an artist instead of just someone who owned a camera.
But underneath the satisfaction of creating something worthwhile lurked the knowledge that I couldn't hide in my childhood bedroom forever. Sooner or later, I'd have to venture beyond the safe boundaries of Main Street and into the parts of Hollow Pines where memories lived and breathed and waited for me to be brave enough to face them.
Sooner or later, I'd have to see Evan.
Sooner or later, I'd have to decide if coming home meant staying home, or if this was just another stop on a journey that had no clear destination.
But for now, it was enough to be here. Enough to breathe air that tasted like memory and take pictures that meant something and remember what it felt like to belong somewhere, even if that belonging came with complications I wasn't ready to face.
For now, it was enough to be home.
12
RUST AND RECOGNITION
EVAN
The smell of motor oil and disappointment clung to everything in the back room of The Pines Lodge, a combination that had become as familiar as breathing over the past few years. I wiped grease from my hands with a rag that had seen better decades, squinting at the carburetor I'd been rebuilding since dawn.
Gideon's ancient delivery truck had been wheezing like a dying animal for weeks, and everyone else had written it off as scrap metal waiting to happen. But I'd always been stubborn about lost causes, and there was something satisfying about taking apart an engine until it made sense again, about finding the broken pieces and making them whole.
Unlike most problems in my life, mechanical failures had solutions that didn't require talking.
“Hand me that wire stripper, would you?” Cal called from across the room where he was wrestling with a junction box that looked older than the Lodge itself.
I tossed the tool in his direction, watching as he caught it with the casual precision of someone who'd been doing this work longer than I'd been alive.
