He wasn’t looking forward to this visit, and he’d planned to get some sleep first, but he couldn’t. Too much time had passed already, and there was someone he needed to see before it was too late. So his reservation at Blessings Bed and Breakfast, and the bed with his name on it, were going to have to wait. He flipped the visor back down, put the bike into gear, and rode up Main Street, watching for the turn that would take him to the hospital.

* * *

The Knox family had just ushered in the new year in total silence—eyeing each other from their seats in their mother’s hospital room—already wondering about the disposition of the family home before their mother, Marjorie, had yet to take her last breath.

It wasn’t as if she had a fortune to fight over. Just a little three-bedroom house at the far end of Peach Street that backed up to the city park. The roof was old. It didn’t leak, but it wouldn’t sell in that condition. The floor in the kitchen had a dip in the middle of it, and the furniture was over thirty years old, but right now, it appeared to be a bigger issue than watching their mother still struggling to breathe.

Marjorie had given birth to six children. The oldest, a little girl named Shelly, died from asthma before she ever started school.

Four of her children—Junior, Emma, Ray, and Bridgette, who they called Birdie—were sitting with Marjorie in her hospital room. Only Hunter, the second child and eldest son, was missing. No one knew where he was now, and all knew better than to mention his name.

Their father, Parnell Knox, had died six years ago of emphysema. Marjorie always said he smoked himself to death, and while she’d never smoked a day in her life, now she was dying of lung cancer from someone else’s addiction. The diagnosis had been a shock, then she got angry. She was dying because of secondhand smoke.

* * *

Sometimes Marjorie was vaguely aware of a nurse beside the bed, and sometimes she thought she heard her children talking, and then she would drift again. She could see daylight and a doorway just up ahead, and she wanted to go there. She didn’t remember why, but she couldn’t leave yet. She was waiting for something. She just couldn’t remember what.

* * *

Ava Ridley was the nurse at Marjorie’s bedside. Ava had grown up with the Knox kids because Marjorie had been her babysitter from the time that she was a toddler. Her childhood dream had been to grow up and marry Hunt. But at the time he was a senior in high school, she was a freshman in the same class with his brother, Ray.