What she’d wanted from those travels was to become someone else altogether, not to crawl out of her body but to claw her way out of the memories that threatened to define her. Somehow she believed that if she constructed a rich, full present and an even more exciting future, she could bury the past.

But it hadn’t worked that way.

No excursion or new setting had soothed her heartache; no first-class flight or five-star hotel had defined what “home” meant to her. Her job had blessed her with adventure and purpose, but it had never done what she’d intended—sew up the torn places where her family’s absence was felt.

Without her express permission, her heart continued to seek what she’d lost, what she couldn’t stop loving.

Her family didn’t know this side of her—the professional, voyage-trekking woman who’d experienced people and places they’d be hard-pressed to imagine. But didn’t they still know her better than anyone else? Who cared what her eyes had seen or her body had sensed if those experiences had no connection to what really mattered?

One place she’d never been; one job she’d never been assigned from any magazine—Ireland. And always her dad asked, “Ireland yet?” And she would tell him, “No, Dad, the next one is Argentina.” Or it could have been California or Idaho or Maine. They weren’t always exotic locales, but they were continuously fascinating.

Colleen stepped into her brother’s Jeep and drove another few miles before pulling into the family home, up the long pebble driveway with the overgrown azaleas crowding the edges. She hadn’t seen them in bloom in years. If pressed, she couldn’t remember the colors of the blossoms.

The front of the one-story white brick house faced the street and stretched out sunbathing on the wide green lawn where ancient oak trees spread their limbs like a crocheted blanket across the sky. Spanish moss hung from those trees, catching and holding on to the summer light, hoarding it for the coming fall.

The driveway curved from the road to one side of the house between the house and detached garage. In that space, Colleen parked the Jeep and stared directly into the backyard, where the sloping green lawn rushed toward the river. A dilapidated tree fort clung to the largest oak with the last of its rusted nails. The back of the house possessed a small screened-in porch on the left side and to the right a set of three stairs and small concrete porch covered by a striped blue awning where a screen door opened to the kitchen.