The moving truck hadn’t even pulled away when Ethan Walker saw her, standing on the porch across the street like she’d been waiting for him all these years. Lena Brooks, the girl who used to skateboard past his house every summer, now a woman with eyes that seemed to know exactly how heavy his duffel bag really was.
His son tugged at his hand, asking about the swing set in the backyard. But Ethan couldn’t move because coming home wasn’t supposed to feel like this, like walking back into a life he’d abandoned into a neighborhood that remembered the boy he used to be before the uniform, before the divorce, before he became the kind of father who had to rebuild everything from scratch.
The house looked smaller than Ethan remembered. He stood on the cracked driveway.
His 5-year-old son Cameron pressed against his leg and stared at the two-story colonial that had belonged to his parents. The white paint was peeling near the shutters. The front step sagged slightly on the left side, and the maple tree in the yard had grown so tall its branches now scraped the roof during windstorms.
