Chapter 11 The Road Back
THE ROAD BACK
NATE
SIX YEARS LATER
The bus wheezed to a stop like it was dying, brakes screaming against morning air that tasted of pine and regret. I pressed my forehead against the grimy window and watched mist curl over the ridges surrounding Hollow Pines, that familiar gray shroud that had haunted my dreams for six years.
Home. The word sat heavy in my chest, equal parts comfort and accusation.
Six years in Chicago, and the place looked exactly the same.
Same weathered buildings huddled against the forest like they were afraid of what lived in the trees.
Same crooked welcome sign that someone had been meaning to fix since I was eighteen.
Same sense that time moved differently here, slower and more deliberate, like the town existed in its own pocket universe where change was something that happened to other people.
Only I'd changed. Gotten older, more cynical, beat down by a city that chewed up dreamers and spit out bitter twenty-somethings with student loan debt and a portfolio full of photographs that nobody wanted to buy.
Six months ago, I'd stood in Marcus Rothstein's gallery on North Michigan Avenue, watching him flip through my portfolio.
“Technically proficient,” he'd said, the words falling like stones into the silence between us.
“But there's no heart here. No story. Just pretty pictures of urban decay that every photography student in the city has already shot.” He'd closed the portfolio with a snap that sounded like a coffin lid.
“Come back when you have something to say, kid.”
I'd walked out into the October wind feeling like I'd been filleted, exposed and bloody and utterly fucking hollow.
Three years of saving, scraping, building toward that one moment—gone in less than ten minutes.
The worst part wasn't the rejection. It was the truth buried in his dismissal: somewhere along the way, I'd stopped feeling anything when I looked through my viewfinder.
Chicago had bled me dry of wonder, leaving behind nothing but technical skill and empty ambition.
That night, I'd sat in my shoebox apartment with my phone in my hands, Evan's number pulled up but never dialed.
Six years of radio silence, and what would I even say?
“Hey, remember me? The guy who left you behind to chase dreams that turned out to be nightmares?” I'd stared at those ten digits until they blurred, then set the phone aside and opened another beer instead.
The memory tasted like failure and missed chances, bitter as the burnt coffee they'd been serving on Greyhound buses since the dawn of time. I should have called. Should have swallowed my pride months ago, years ago, the moment I realized I was drowning in a city that didn't give a damn about me.
But pride was a luxury I couldn't afford anymore.
“Hollow Pines,” the driver called out, voice rough with cigarettes and early morning shifts. “End of the line.”
End of the line. Yeah, that sounded about right.
I shouldered my camera bag and grabbed my duffel from the overhead rack, muscles protesting the familiar weight.
The bus station hadn't changed either. Same plastic chairs, same vending machines that probably still ate your dollar bills, same fluorescent lights that made everyone look half-dead.
But there they were, standing by the door like they'd never left, like they'd been waiting for me to come to my senses and find my way home.
Mom and Dad. Unchanged by time in that particular way parents had of existing as constants while everything else fell apart around you.
Mom saw me first, her face lighting up. Six years of phone calls and holiday cards, of making excuses for why I couldn't come home for Christmas or Thanksgiving or the hundred other occasions when I should have been here instead of pretending I was too important, too busy, too successful to need the people who'd loved me first.
“Nate,” she breathed, and then she was hugging me with the fierce desperation of someone who'd thought she might never get the chance again. Her hair smelled like the same shampoo she'd used when I was eighteen, floral and warm and achingly familiar.
“Hi, Mom,” I said, voice rougher than I'd intended. Six years of smoking too much and drinking too much and pretending I didn't miss home had left their mark.
Dad waited his turn, patient as always, watching. When Mom finally let me go, he stepped forward and clapped a hand on my shoulder, the gesture saying everything he couldn't put into words.
“Good to have you back, son.”
The simple acceptance in his voice nearly broke me.
No questions about why I'd called from the bus station instead of the airport, why I'd come home with nothing but a duffel bag and a camera instead of the success story I'd promised when I left.
Just Dad being Dad, steady and reliable and exactly what I needed.
“Good to be back,” I lied, because the truth was too complicated and I wasn't ready to bleed all over them in a public place.
The drive home was a study in careful normalcy, Mom chattering about town news while Dad navigated streets I could have driven blindfolded.
And somewhere in this maze of familiar streets, Evan was living his life. Working, breathing, existing in the same space I'd abandoned like it meant nothing.
“Your room's just like you left it,” Mom said as we pulled into the driveway. “I changed the sheets yesterday, made sure everything was ready.”
Inside, the house smelled like coffee and cinnamon rolls, like Saturday mornings when the world was smaller and my biggest worry was whether I'd remembered to do my algebra homework.
My feet found the familiar creaks in the hardwood floors, muscle memory guiding me up stairs that had witnessed a thousand teenage heartbreaks and triumphs.
My room felt like it was frozen in time like a museum exhibit dedicated to the boy I used to be. Movie posters on the walls, books stacked on the desk, camera equipment I'd deemed too amateur to take with me to my sophisticated new life.
And the photographs. Fuck, the photographs.
Every wall was covered with prints I'd made in high school, images of Hollow Pines seen through eighteen-year-old eyes that still believed the world was full of magic.
The Old Mill shrouded in morning mist. Main Street during the winter festival, lanterns glowing like fairy lights.
The forest at twilight, shadows that seemed to move when you weren't looking directly at them.
And Evan. There were so many pictures of Evan.
I'd tried to be subtle about it, tried to make it look like he just happened to be in frame when I was documenting other things. But looking at them now, the truth was painfully obvious.
I'd been documenting a love story that only one person knew was happening.
My hands shook as I set down my camera bag. Evan at seventeen, caught in profile during one of our walks to the forest. Evan at eighteen, graduation cap askew and that almost-smile playing around his mouth. Evan, Evan, Evan, like a prayer I'd been too cowardly to speak aloud.
“I'll let you get settled,” Mom said from the doorway. “Dinner's at six if you want to join us.”
I nodded, not trusting my voice to hold steady. When she was gone, I collapsed onto the bed and stared at the ceiling, trying to process the reality of being back in this room, this house, this town where every corner held memories I'd spent years trying to forget.
Chicago had been supposed to fix me. The University of Chicago photography program, internships with prestigious magazines, gallery showings that would make my name.
Instead, I'd floundered through four years of college taking pictures that professors called “technically proficient but emotionally vacant,” words that would echo later in Marcus Rothstein's gallery like a prophecy I'd been too stupid to heed.
I'd managed two years in the city after graduation, scraping by on wedding gigs and stock photography, sharing a cramped apartment with three other aspiring artists who were all slowly coming to terms with the gap between dreams and reality.
But it was that October afternoon in Rothstein's gallery that had finally broken something fundamental in me.
Standing there while he dismissed my entire body of work as “pretty pictures with no heart”.
Maybe I'd been chasing someone else's version of success so hard I'd forgotten what had made me pick up a camera in the first place.
When the lease ran out and I couldn't afford the rent increase, when my last client stiffed me on payment and my credit cards were maxed out, when I woke up one morning and realized I hadn't taken a single photograph in weeks that made me feel anything at all, I'd called Mom from the Greyhound station with Rothstein's words still ringing in my ears and asked if my room was still available.
The worst part? Part of me was relieved. All that time pretending I belonged in a city that never felt like home, swallowing my pride and my homesickness like bitter medicine, and all it had gotten me was a portfolio full of empty images and a heart that had forgotten how to feel wonder.
Maybe it was time to stop running from the one place that had ever made sense.
Dinner was an exercise in careful conversation, Mom and Dad asking safe questions about the bus ride and whether I wanted to borrow the car tomorrow, while I picked at Anna's famous pot roast and tried to pretend I wasn't falling apart from the inside out.
“So,” Mom said eventually, because Anna Harrington had never met a silence she couldn't fill with gentle curiosity. “Are you planning to stay for a while, or is this just a visit?”
“I don't know,” I said, which was the most honest thing I'd said since stepping off the bus. “I need to figure some things out.”
Dad set down his fork and looked at me with those steady eyes that had guided me through every crisis of my adolescence.