After a few minutes of winding, we took another left turn onto a narrow gravel road called Trout Lane, which led to my childhood home. From here, you could see the hill in the distance that overlooked town and made up Dragonfly Heights, the neighborhood that was the exact opposite of where I’d grown up. My childhood home didn’t have a neighborhood name, not officially. Though there were no train tracks anywhere nearby, wrong side of the tracks pretty much nailed it.

Another turn, and we were on the long, rut-filled gravel driveway that led to my parents’ place. They’d put up a sign my dad made years ago that said Bluebird Lane, because my mom loved bluebirds, but there wasn’t much idyllic about it in reality.

The driveway was a half-mile long, and the trees were thick on both sides. As we rounded the last bend, my breath caught as a tidal wave of emotions rolled over me. Pulled me under.

“God,” I said before I could stop myself.

The exterior paint had been peeling when I still lived here, and it hadn’t been touched since. On one end of the trailer was a window box for flowers, and rust was overtaking it. The screen door was missing its screen, and the wood planks of the deck that my dad had built on the front decades ago desperately needed to be replaced.

That was mostly status quo. No matter how handy my dad was and how hard he worked to maintain the place, their funds and his time had never been enough to keep up on the nonessential repairs.

Now though…

I blew out a gust of a breath, taking in the whole scene.

In addition to the trailer where my parents lived, there was a carport, a storage shed, and my dad’s shop. He’d constructed all the outbuildings over the years and had taken meticulous care of each of them. As he liked to say, They aren’t much, but they’re mine. Now they were even less, and it made me sick to my stomach to see.

The shop looked okay, but both the storage shed and the carport had been… crushed. That was the only word for it. My parents’ SUV was parked close to the front door, away from the carport, seeming undamaged, so that was something. The two buildings looked to be a total loss though.

“Wow,” Holden said, and I whipped my gaze to him, wishing I’d insisted on coming here alone. There wasn’t anything about this visit that was comfortable.

“Do you want to pick me up later?” I asked and bit down on the inside of my lip. “There’s no sense in—”

“What?” He sounded outraged. “Chloe, we’re telling them we’re getting married. That’s not a one-person job… unless you know something I don’t, like your dad has it in for me or something.”