But I stayed by the window. It wasn’t as if my room here was truly my room anyhow; it was where I was staying over the holiday. My real bedroom was in the empty house across town.

However, Dad was staying here and Mom was in Missouri, and I was helping out at the Hoyden.

When I showed up out of the blue last week, Grandma Jo directed me to one of the “just in case” rooms at the back of the inn she kept unoccupied for emergencies. They weren’t great rooms. Big enough for a twin bed, wooden desk and chair, dresser, closet complete with foldout ironing board, and a “full” bathroom that would’ve been better suited to a camper.

There was a reason she didn’t rent those out to the public. But beggars/choosers and all that.

Grandma Jo lived in one of the cottages because, as she liked to say, she needed at least the semblance of separation from the inn so she didn’t lose her mind. She usually rented out the other three, but Dad occupied one now.

It was weird how I learned about him and Mom.

I had spent the days leading up to my travel envisioning a scene of me knocking on the front door and one of my parents—probably Mom—opening the door and seeing me standing there with my luggage and me smiling and saying “Surprise!”

Then Mom’s face would light up and she’d hug me and then Dad would hug me and once they got over the surprise, they’d ask me what I was doing there.

That would be the perfect lead-in for my desire to come home permanently and they’d be so happy I was there with them that they’d be receptive. I would move back into my room on the second floor with its bay window overlooking the front yard and everything would go back to how it was when I left six months ago.

None of that happened.

Instead, I had arrived at the house early in the evening to find it was quiet. Even the front porch light had been off, which was odd.

I’d knocked on the front door before using my house key to enter, pulling my luggage behind me into the foyer.

No one answered when I called out and by that point I knew something was off. The air was stagnant and every murdery Dateline episode I’d ever watched flashed before my eyes.

I stepped back outside and called Grandma Jo.

Once she got over the surprise, she sent Dad to fetch me.

“Whatcha doin’ here, sport?” he’d asked, as we stood in the living room where I’d grown up.

That had been my first opportunity to tell him about Barrington Academy and my plan to never again darken its doors. But I didn’t. All I really wanted to know was, “Where’s Mom?”