I was halfway down the mountain road when Mrs. Rowan called, and the way her voice sounded before she even finished her first sentence told me everything I needed to know about what I was driving back to.
“Mara, honey,” she said, speaking in that careful, lowered register people use when they are delivering news they did not choose. “There’s a moving truck in your driveway. Your parents are here. And your sister. And the kids.”
She hesitated. “They said you knew.”
I pulled the car to the gravel shoulder and sat there with the engine running and the phone against my ear, and I did not say anything for a long moment because the part of my brain responsible for language was temporarily occupied with trying to process what my ears had just delivered.
