Page 92 of All We Carry Home

Gramps would have been tickled.

A pang of longing hit me in that moment, and the itch of tears clawed at my eyelids.

I hadn’t cried since my parents died. I buried it all down as I always did.

I put Acorn back in her pasture. Warren picked up the grain buckets, and I caught him glancing my way, studying me in a thoughtful, concerned manner.

Our drive back from Seattle had been pleasant. Light conversation and talking about all the different trainers and horse owners we’d met the night before.

It was almost as if we hadn’t nearly kissed and ruined everything.

I retreated to the house and found Annie in the kitchen with two kittens on the table drinking out of a bowl of milk. “Cats off the table,” I said, for at least the hundredth time.

Annie smiled and moved the kittens. “I think Speckles will have her kittens soon, Eva.”

A dull pain throbbed in the base of my skull.

Annie disappeared and came back with a rusted, black metal box the size of a shoebox. “I was looking for a box for her and her babies and found this.”

My heart stumbled to a stop, and I sank to a chair at the table. I hadn’t seen that container in some time.

She put it on the table and pushed it toward me. “What are these?”

I touched the top of the lid, the cold, pitted metal, and a wave of memories washed over me. I knew every item inside without even opening the box. Gramps had kept it for the past nineteen years of my life.

War medals.

The regional champion ribbon I’d won at age eight.

Gramps’s dog tags from the Great War.

A casing from a .45-caliber bullet, one of the many that had buried and burned me as I huddled on the floor of the Chevy during the shootout. My hand instinctively went to my forearm, where the burns still showed on my skin.

That casing was the only item I’d kept from my life before Birkstrom.

I picked up the box and tossed it onto the kitchen counter with a clatter. Annie yelped in surprise.

“Sorry, Annie. Not that box. Can you see if your father might need your help right now? I need to make phone calls and could use some quiet.”

Annie nodded, scooped the two kittens up, and raced out the front door.

Guilt filled me for being so cross with her. I pressed my palm to my forehead, circling the kitchen and eyeing the metal box. The clasp in front looked seized shut. Good riddance.

Mrs. Hartford’s comments in Seattle. Warren’s connection to that fateful bank. Annie unearthing this time capsule.

No matter how much I ran from it, my parents’ shadow was always there to blot out the sun.

Warren

JUNE 19

I finished the morning feedings and lifted my head to look in the direction of Beacon’s Bluff. There wasn’t any reason to worry. It was a good thing that Eva was taking her morning rides again. There’d been a new light in her eyes and a fire in her step ever since.

The last few mornings, we’d fallen into a routine. Just as I arrived at dawn and began to feed, she and Acorn would ride up, a vision of an angel on horseback without bridle or saddle, hair flowing in the wind, cheeks pink from the sun.

Today, she was late.

Eddie walked by with a bale of straw.