He hustled Justin into his arms and headed down the hallway, rushing past all those photographs again. Trying to not look at Zelda, who still lay in the broken wood and glass of the coffee table, moaning his name. She caught sight of Asher moving toward her, carrying Justin and she reached out her arm, her face full of hurt. Not anger or malice. Grief.

“Please don’t do this,” she begged.

Justin slept soundly, accordioned across his father’s arms.

He would remember this act of leaving her for the rest of his life.

He slid Justin onto the back seat. The child’s eyes fluttered open and then closed as sleep overwhelmed him again.

A turn of the key, the slide of the gearshift, and then the Jeep was peeling out, the wisps of the willow sucked away as they moved up the driveway and onto the road, then onto the smooth purr of blacktop where Asher once again could hear the cicadas screaming along the black river in the hot, still night.

Part Two

Part Two

The Open Road

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The red of morning streaked the eastern sky before they had even crossed the county line. Asher drove out of the little town he had known his entire life—Good-bye, Cumberland Valley—and into the great unknown of a new day and a new life. He hoped so, at least.

Asher drove as his boy slept on the car seat beside him.

He held on to the steering wheel with both hands, leaning forward with determination, eyeing the highway, looking over occasionally to reassure himself that Justin was still there and not just some dream he had conjured up out of his misery.

He was there. He was. Stolen. And Asher’s now, again. The news and the law would say Asher had kidnapped Justin, that a father couldn’t love that strongly, that a man couldn’t possibly care so much, and that the whole affair had been done simply for spite.

No. Justin is my child. My boy.

Only now, driving away with Zelda lying on the floor and most likely hurt, did he realize how much worse he had made things. But it was too late now, and he wasn’t giving up Justin. He shouldn’t have to.

So they would go to Key West. They’d find Luke and he would know what to do. He always had.

He drove south.

Asher had never been anywhere, really, and most of his travels had been as an evangelist before he became pastor at the church in Cumberland Valley. To Gulf Shores a few times, Atlanta twice, for church conferences, lots of little bitty churches in Northern Alabama and Southern Kentucky and East Tennessee for revivals. He had grown up less than an hour from Nashville but had never relished going downtown and tried to make trips down there as seldom as possible.