Chapter 7

It had been a good move for both of us. She wanted to get away from my father and the nosy people there, so she said, and I wanted to get away…well, from other things. I wasn’t entirely sure I was ready to go back there, even ten years later. Even for only a visit. I never had in the ten years since I’d left. Emily and her family came out once to visit, and one of my brothers stopped by to see me for an hour on his way to Hawaii.

But I didn’t exactly want to stay here with my memories of Donald either. Honestly, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do.

Three weeks after Donald’s death, I was going through the computer he kept in his office, looking at the digital photos he’d stored there. My cheeks were wet with the tears I couldn’t seem to stop as I went through photo after photo. One of the projects Donald had been working on was scanning his family’s old slides, so many of the pictures I was browsing through were from when Donald had been a child, a teenager, and a young adult.