I turned to face the window, feeling like maybe I was ready to do this after all. That it probably had been ridiculous to avoid it for all these years.
“Where is it?” Clark asked, looking out to the side of the road, then at me.
I started to answer, but it got caught somewhere in my throat as I stared out through the rain-streaked window. I somehow couldn’t get my brain to understand, to process what was right in front of me. I looked around, wondering if there was any way I’d taken us down the wrong street, if we’d turned too early . . .
But even as I thought it, I knew that wasn’t the case. Clark pulled to the side of the road, and I got out of the car as soon as he put it in park, not even caring about the rain, and walked across the street, to the spot where the farmhouse had been.
But it wasn’t there.
There wasn’t anything there. Just the plot of land, slightly overgrown, though I was pretty sure I could still see where the foundation had once been.
I was getting soaked; the rain was running down my face and I wasn’t even moving to wipe it away. So the house had been torn down. My dad had sold it; I knew that much, so maybe it had been here for a while before it was knocked down? I looked around, as though I was going to get some information from the deserted street, but there wasn’t anything. Just an empty space where our house, my whole world when I was a kid, had been. And now, unless you’d known, you wouldn’t even stop to slow down and look at it. You would never have known anything was there at all.
I waited for the devastation to come—the tears, the feeling that things were falling apart. But it didn’t.
I looked around through the rain, at the place where our house had been, and realized that it was just a piece of land. That was all it had ever been. It was the fact that the three of us had lived there together that had made it special. But now when I thought about home . . .
A series of images flashed through my mind. It was my dad in the kitchen, heating me up a slice of pizza, along with one for himself. It was walking back and forth with Palmer between our two houses. It was running up and down the stairs like crazy people as we gathered scavenger-hunt supplies. It was sharing a piece of cheesecake with my father. It wasn’t the farmhouse, not anymore.
“Hi.” I turned to see Clark standing next to me, raising his voice to be heard over the rain. He looked at the empty lot, then at me, his brow furrowed, and I could see just how much he was regretting this. “Andie, I—”
“Car,” I said, taking his hand and walking back across the street toward it, feeling like there wasn’t any need for us to get even more soaked. I climbed into the passenger seat, and Clark got behind the wheel a few seconds later. When he shut the door, it was like someone had turned off the volume—with the rain gone, it was suddenly very quiet, and much warmer.
“I’m so sorry,” Clark said immediately. “I didn’t realize—”
“It’s okay,” I said. I gave him a half smile. “Really.”
“Really?”
I nodded. “Yeah.” There was just the sound of the rain, then I said, “I always thought I didn’t want to come back here. I’ve been avoiding this place for five years. And in the end . . .” I looked back at where the house had been once more. “It would have been better to do this years ago. I was making it so much harder for myself when it didn’t have to be.” What Bri had said to Toby about Wyatt flashed into my head. “I think it’s better to face it,” I said.
Something passed over Clark’s face, and he looked down at the steering wheel.
“I do wish I could have gone back inside before it got knocked down, though.” Clark nodded, and I knew he probably assumed it was for sentimental reasons. I paused for only a second, listening to the rain hitting the window, before telling him what I’d never told anyone. “I always thought maybe my mom left something for me in there.”
“Like what?”