The Prodigal's Return

by Anna DeStefano

  He walked up the path toward the faded oak door. The house’s gray brick looked sturdy enough still. But what used to be midnight-blue trim had mottled under the burden of time and too much sun, its pasty color the perfect accompaniment to the falling-down neglect that permeated everything. The few shutters remaining on the windows listed at odd angles, missing row after row of slats. And the two-story traditional’s roof had buckled under years of Georgia heat, warping and blistering in places, cracking off in chunks in others. He reached the top of the front steps, avoided several loose boards and turned to survey the yard again.

  An unexpected urgency swamped him. Guilt spiked through the need not to be there. The years of silence between him and his father were supposed to have brought the man closure. The peace neither of them had been able to find with the other still in his life. From the looks of things, Nathan had chosen to give up instead.

  The chill of the doorknob felt strange as he turned it. Foreign. Unfamiliar. Even stranger when it resisted and refused to pivot.

  The door was locked.

  As far back as he could remember, his parents had never locked up. There’d been no need in a town like Rivermist. More to the point, he had no keys. He’d thrown them away the day his personal effects were returned when he left prison. He couldn’t keep the keys and not want to come back.

  But leaving his home behind and being locked out of it were two different things.

  “Come on!” He jiggled the handle, then rapped his knuckles on one of the glass panels set in the top half of the custom-built door. He rang the bell, as if that would convince the town recluse to answer.

  A shadow behind the frosted glass caught his eye. Someone was coming after all. Someone too tiny and far too feminine-looking, even through the door’s grimy windows, to be his father.

  Buford had said the man lived alone.

  So who the hell was unlocking the front door?

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE DEADBOLT SCRAPED BACK. The door squeaked open. Hinges made their grinding protest heard. Then everything that should have been gone from Neal’s empty heart stood before him, confusion and shock clouding her beautiful features.

  Jennifer Gardner.

  The embodiment of all he’d given up. The dream it had been pointless to keep dreaming.

  His Jennifer.

  No! Not his. Not for eight long years.

  “What—what are you doing here, Jenn?” He forced out the shorter version of her name. The one he’d never used, not once, after they started dating in high school.

  High school.

  The memories came rushing back, now that she was standing there in front of him.

  They’d fallen in love freshman year, unexpected feelings taking hold. Attraction growing out of years of inseparable friendship. Holding hands giving way to a shocking first kiss, and the discovery and urgency that had soon followed. They’d started dating for real as sophomores. Then a late afternoon walk around the lake that fall had ended with the sweetest first time a boy growing into a man could have hoped for. And so he’d left his funny friend Jenn behind with his childhood, and had refused to call her anything but Jennifer since.

  Used to drive Reverend Gardner crazy.

  Now…

  He couldn’t deal with calling her Jennifer. Couldn’t deal with her being here, so beautiful and sad and still, in the last place she was supposed to be—as if she’d been waiting for him all this time.

  “I…” Pain crowded out the shock on her face. Her mouth opened and closed, but no other sound emerged.

  “Jenn?” The irritating form of her name shielded him. Pissed him off. “What—”

  “I…I stopped by to see if I could help—”

  “Nitpick is more like it,” a craggy voice grumped from behind her. Unsteady footsteps shuffled toward the door. “Years of no one giving a damn what goes on in this house, now it’s like a parade traipsing through here.”

  Neal braced himself, locking onto Jenn’s stare to keep his feet planted on the porch, instead of beating a path back to his car. Dread was too tame a word for the half-anxious, half-nauseous queasiness flooding his system as the door was yanked from her grasp and flung wide.

  “Who the—” His father’s tirade froze in midsentence when he caught sight of Neal.

  Neal couldn’t believe the man standing in front of him was his father. Unkempt beard, bloodshot eyes. The wasted pallor of someone who’d been bingeing on whatever vice drove him to not giving a shit the fastest.

  “You son of a bitch,” his father spat out. Then the man squinted an accusing glare at the stunned woman wringing her hands between them. “You little—”

  “Jenn has nothing to do with me being here.” It made no sense that Nathan would think she had, but rushing to Jenn’s defense was as instinctive as breathing in the impossibly fresh scent of her hair, taking her essence into his lungs when what he craved was to have her back in his empty arms.

  He reached toward her, wondering if some truly lost part of his mind had conjured her up. When she edged out of his grasp, he yanked his hand back, disgusted with himself.

  Get a grip! You’re scaring her to death.

  “I had no idea Jenn still lived in Rivermist,” he said. Keep looking at the old man. “Let alone that she’d be… Exactly what is she doing here?”

  “Driving me crazy, with all her harping, that’s what she’s doing. You here to take a crack at what’s left?”

  Jenn’s shoulders straightened as she built up steam to respond. Neal braced himself for another blast of her sweet voice. He finally looked her way again, forcing down his need for her. Forcing his “nothing gets in” expression to stay put.

  Her eyes filled with tears, striking him even harder than her voice had. She shoved her hands into the pockets of well-worn, lovingly fitted jeans, stared at the ground for a beat, then glanced back up with a broken smile.

  God, that smile.

  “I should be going,” she said as she escaped back down the shadowy hallway, toward the kitchen he’d once eaten in every morning. Her absence made it both possible and painful to breathe again.

  “You got somethin’ to say?” his father demanded. “’Cause I’ve had just about enough of—”

  “Buford called me.” Neal refocused on his one and only reason for being there. “You look like hell, and the man’s worried.”

  Why bother with pleasantries? Whatever this moment was going to be, he’d known a warm reunion wasn’t on the menu.

  “You volunteering to babysit, too?” His father straightened to his full height for the first time, a good inch taller than Neal. He raised a shaking hand to push at the slimy hair falling into his eyes. The man smelled like a three-day binge. “You ready to give me your version of how much I got to live for?”

  Nathan braced a shoulder on the doorjamb and winced against what looked like a whopper of a hangover.

  Or was it?

  How much I got to live for…

  Neal looked to where Jenn had disappeared. Replayed the disjointed conversation spoken around him in the last few minutes.

  She had been helping his father out around the house, but from the looks of the dust and cobwebs coating everything in sight, not for terribly long. And clearly not by invitation. At the same time that the man’s condition had sent Buford reaching out long-distance to Neal.

  Holy hell.

  Neal stared at his father in denial. The man just stood there, waiting for him to catch a clue or get out. It didn’t seem to matter which.

  “You’re dying?” It was an impossible thought.

  “Like you care.”

  “Care!” Neal desperately needed to be in his Mustang—the one he’d bought and painstakingly restored because it was his father’s favorite model—and speeding back down the road to Atlanta.

  Except he couldn’t move.

  Jenn brushed against him as she hustled by, her head down. Her coat lay carelessly across one arm, despite the afternoon temperature th
at barely clung to the freezing mark. “I…I’ll come back tomorrow, Nathan, to finish up the kitchen.”

  Neal watched her until she was out of sight. Biting his tongue barely stifled the urge to call her back. To not leave him alone with the reality waiting for him when he turned around.

  His father was dying.

  Slam!

  And the bastard had just hit him in the ass with the front door.

  HE ISN’T HERE.

  Neal isn’t really back.

  Right, he wasn’t back. And she hadn’t just left through the front door, instead of the kitchen where she’d gone to get her coat, just to have an excuse to be near him one more time. To touch him before he disappeared again, like some ghost who’d waited for her most vulnerable moment since returning to Rivermist to mess with her head.

  “Jenn!”

  Her ghost was jogging toward her across the scarred front lawn, the effortless athletic grace of each stride stalling her just long enough for him to catch up. She turned her back, but there was no escape even in that. Parked behind her car was a shiny red Mustang, the make and model of the beautifully restored classic one hundred percent the Neal Cain she’d loved, no matter how the man behind her resembled a total stranger now.

  “Jenn?”

  His touch on her elbow was so light, maybe she’d imagined it. Imagined him coming after her like a weak confused part of her had wanted him to. But there was no ignoring the pressure he exerted as he turned her around.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t want to bother you… But, I—I need to know what’s going on with Nathan.”

  Bother her?

  Now why would him being here, making her feel things that would only destroy her again if she let them, bother her?

  “Jenn?”

  “I have to go.” She fumbled for the door handle, shattered by him calling her anything but Jennifer. By the sound of him calling his father Nathan. There was nothing familiar in that tight voice. Deadness, instead of warmth, filled those eyes. So why did she want to crawl into his arms and cling to the reality of simply having him here, no matter how little of the boy she’d loved had returned in the body of this dangerous-looking man?

  “Don’t leave, please.” Something in that calm expression shifted. A softening as he reached to thumb a tear from her cheek, only to stiffen before he actually touched her. “I know I’m upsetting you, but I need to know what’s going on with Na—”

  “You’re going to have to talk with your father yourself.” Finally managing to open the car door, she crawled inside. She had to get out of there, before she curled into a ball and burst into tears. “I’m sure you two have a lot to catch up on.”

  “He shut the door in my face.” Neal held fast to the door frame, a fine tremor shaking his fingers.

  “Mine, too.” His distress worked its way through her panic. She forced herself to remember what this man’s return could mean for Nathan, regardless of the disaster it already was for her. “But I got in. You will, too, Neal. I don’t think your dad wants to be alone nearly as much as he pretends he does.”

  “He locked me out, Jenn.”

  “Then break the door down.” She fired the engine, prepared to leave whether he let go or not.

  Please let go.

  But as he finally stepped back, the loss that had destroyed her in the courtroom years ago threatened to consume her all over again.

  “IS EVERYTHING ALL RIGHT?” her dad called as Jenn and Mandy hurried in the front door, bringing the cold night in with them.

  It was hours past the two o’clock she’d promised to return by.

  “I’m sorry we’re so late. I didn’t make it back to pick up Mandy until after six. I’ll get started on dinner.”

  “Dinner’s fine. I popped a frozen pizza in the oven a few minutes ago. What happened at Nathan’s? I was worried.”

  “Mandy, honey. Why don’t you play upstairs for a bit until the pizza’s ready?” Jenn forced a smile as she grabbed the coat off her twirling child. An everyday routine they followed without thinking, only today the normalcy of it earned Mandy an extra hug.

  This child was a reminder of all Jenn had done right since leaving Rivermist in shame. Everything she could still do right in her life, if she stayed and kept trying, instead of running—which was exactly what she’d talked herself out of doing as she drove in circles for hours before finally driving to Ashley’s.

  “’Kay, Mommy.” The six-year-old headed up the stairs, giving her grandfather plenty of space.

  Disappointment flickered across his features.

  “She’ll get over this morning, Dad.” Jenn patted his shoulder, then shucked off her own coat. “She loves you to pieces.”

  She found herself drowning in his gaze, the word love swirling in the perpetually choppy waters between them. If only she could claim for herself what she just had for her daughter—that she loved this man to pieces. But that kind of trust was beyond them still, just when she desperately needed it back.

  Yet, he’d been worried about her, even if his concern came in the guise of heating an oven-baked pizza. That was something at least.

  “Something’s wrong,” he said. “Is it Nathan?”

  Nathan, Traci, Neal—where did she start?

  Neal.

  Her mind had refused to settle on anything else, no matter how pointless and painful it was to replay how tall and breathtakingly handsome he still was. He’d been right there in front of her. Touching her and talking to her. And she’d—

  Stop it!

  “Mr. Cain…” she began, forcing her thoughts back to what she dealt with best: other people’s problems. “He’s dying, Dad. Nathan Cain’s dying.”

  “TELL ME YOU DIDN’T KNOW,” Neal demanded as he barged past Buford’s sputtering secretary and into the lawyer’s office.

  “Mr. Richmond?” asked the young girl manning what used to be Gretchen McCrady’s desk.

  “It’s okay, Belinda.” Buford waved her away and waited for the door to close before addressing Neal. “I take it you’ve seen your daddy’s place for yourself. It’s a shame how he’s let that house go. I tried to tell you—”

  “Screw the house.” Neal dropped into the age-worn club chair that had been across from the man’s desk since Buford and Nathan started the firm twenty-five years ago. “Tell me you didn’t call me down here on the pretence of making sure my father saw a doctor, knowing full well the man was dying.”

  “Dying?” The leather of Buford’s chair groaned as he leaned forward. “Who told you that?”

  “Nathan! Sort of. The two of them were acting weird, then something he said hit me—only a minute before the front door did, when he locked me out. I’ve tried for hours to get him to open back up, but—”

  “They?” Buford roused himself from his shock to zero in on the one part of Neal’s ramblings he wanted to discuss the least. “Are you telling me your daddy had company?”

  Neal pushed out of the chair and prowled to the opposite end of the office.

  “Jenn Gardner was there.”

  Buford’s low whistle ended in the man contemplating the hands he’d folded in his lap. “Now, ain’t that somethin’. That girl and her family haven’t said boo to the old goat since…well, since Nathan lost you, and Reverend and Mrs. Gardner lost Jenn. She must have known something was wrong, for her to—”

  “What do you mean, the Gardners lost Jenn?” Neal had to sit down again.

  She’d looked fine. Startled. Sad, presumably about Nathan. Blond and sweet and heart-stoppingly beautiful. And fine. He’d never expected happily ever after for her, but anything less than fine was unacceptable.

  The hardened gaze of a tough-as-nails Southern lawyer assessed him. “You really have cut yourself off from this place, haven’t you? You never wanted to catch up on local comings and goings when we talked investments and stock dividends. But I always figured you were getting the high points from somewhere. You have investigators, don’t you, for those clients of yours? You me
an to tell me you got no idea what happened to that girl after they carted you up-state?”

  “I didn’t even know she was still living here.” Digging into Jenn’s life would have meant caring about her again, and that would have been unbearable.

  She’d been shooting for med school. If that hadn’t worked out for her, there were other careers. Marriage. Kids. Whatever. Anything was better than the nightmare of him hunting her down after his parole would have been.

  What the hell was going on?

  “She told you your daddy was dying?” Buford’s question quivered with the same disbelief that still raged through Neal.

  “No. She just stood there staring at the two of us, like she wanted to run and hide.”

  “Understandable.” Buford nodded. “Considering…”

  “Considering what?” Damn it! “Don’t answer that. It’s none of my business.”

  Chicken-shit.

  Neal braced his elbows on his knees. “Just tell me what’s wrong with my father and what he needs, so I can make it happen and get out of the man’s way.”

  “Out of his way? You said Nathan’s dyin—”

  “And he doesn’t want me here any more now than before he got sick with whatever’s ailing him.”

  His father’s reaction to seeing him again had said it all. And it had hurt, when nothing in Neal’s world had hurt in a long time.

  The room filled with the sound of the clock ticking in the corner. Nothing else moved.

  “You’re both full of it.” Buford inhaled deeply. “That man’s been waiting for you to show up for years. He—”

  “Doesn’t want a thing from me.” And forcing Nathan to say it again wasn’t going to solve anything. It certainly wasn’t going to fabricate an eleventh-hour relationship out of years of nothing.