Chapter 8
Chapter eight
You’re thinking too hard again, kid
Reid
The driveway crunches under my tires as I pull up outside Grandpa Harry’s place just after noon, easing the truck into the same stretch of curb I’ve been parking in since I was old enough to drive.
The house looks exactly as it always has. Pale siding softened by time, two steps up to a porch that creaks like it’s in pain, windows that fog on the inside when it gets too cold. The railing has been freshly painted, but not fussed over. Modest and lived-in.
Not like my place up on the hill with its flat edges and glass and walls too quiet for their own good.
This house has always been alive. There’s something about it that just breathes, even when the rest of the world goes still.
His garden hits me first, even from the driveway. It’s late winter, so things are quieter than they’ll be in a few months, but it’s still unmistakably his—beds edged clean, soil dark and turned, a handful of stubborn green pushing through where it shouldn’t be yet. It’s orderly chaos.
I step out slower than I want to, weight shifting instinctively to my good leg when my knee twinges in warning.
The front door opens before I can knock.
“There he is,” Harry says, already grinning, already clocking everything. “My favorite grandson!”
“Your only grandson.”
He waves me off. “You know, most people knock. Or at least pretend they were going to.”
I snort and step forward, and he pulls me into a one-armed hug that’s solid and familiar, his free hand squeezing my shoulder once before dropping away.
“You’re late,” he adds mildly.
“I’m not,” I say. “I’m precisely on time.”
“For what?” he asks, deadpan.
I don’t have an answer for that, and he knows it. His eyes flick down to my leg, taking in the way I’m standing.
“That knee still giving you grief?”
“Only when I move,” I say. “Or breathe.”
He hums and steps back to let me in. “You’re walking like an old man.”
“Pot, kettle.”
He laughs under his breath and shuts the door behind me. The house smells like soil and coffee and something warm in the oven. Bread, maybe. Or one of those things he insists isn’t a loaf until it’s cooled and sliced properly.
Everything here feels unchanged in a way the rest of my life hasn’t managed to. There’s the same coat rack by the door, and the same photo frame on the wall with the crooked corner. With me at nine, missing two teeth and grinning like I’d just pulled off some sort of crime. I probably had.
Grandma Adele stands behind me, hands on my shoulders, smiling soft and patient into the camera.
My shoulders drop slightly. I don’t feel the need to brace myself for anything here. Don’t feel the low hum of readiness I carry everywhere else.
But Grandpa notices when something’s bugging me, he always does.
“Garden’s calling,” he says, already reaching for his hat. “Unless you’re too injured for manual labor.”
I follow him out back, tugging my jacket tighter as the air bites. He’s already ambled over and crouched by the nearest bed, fingers bare as he presses into the dirt and mutters something to the tomato plants under his breath.
“You don’t want gloves?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Hands are tougher than people think. Soil’s good for you.”
I lower myself carefully onto one knee beside him, ignoring the protest from my leg. “That’s what you said about chores when I was twelve.”
“And did you die?”
“Emotionally.”
He chuckles and passes me a small hand rake. “Loosen that patch there. Don’t go too deep.”
I do as told, my movements a bit slower than they used to be. The soil gives easily, rich and dark, basically already prepared.
This garden thrives because someone keeps showing up for it, day after day. Season after season.
“You ever think about how nothing stays put?” I ask offhandedly, breaking up a clump of earth. “You clear something back, and it just… comes back.”
Grandpa doesn’t look up. “Most things do.”
“Seems pointless.”
“Only if you think the goal is to make it stop growing,” he says gently. “Some things just need managing, not erasing.”
I glance toward the far corner of the yard, where the old treehouse still stands, built into the fork of the big oak.
The stairs are mostly intact, save for the one near the bottom that always gave way under muddy sneakers.
The wood is graying now, paint long faded, but the bones hold. They always have.
Ivy winds its way up the supports, clinging tighter than I remember. It’s almost halfway to the roof now. I used to rip it back every spring because I hated how it made the whole thing look forgotten.
I frown. “That stuff’s worse than last time.”
“Mmhmm.”
“I used to keep it trimmed back.”
“You did,” Harry agrees.
“But you stopped letting me.”
He finally looks at me then, eyes kind as he nods. “I did.”
“Why?”
He turns back to the bed, brushing dirt from his fingers. “Delly loved that ivy.”
I still at my grandpa’s nickname for my grandmother. She’s been gone five years now.
“Said it looked like something out of a fairytale,” he continues. “And she said if something wanted to grow that badly, maybe it deserved the space.”
I swallow. “It’ll take over the whole thing eventually.”
“Maybe,” he says. “But I think it might be reinforcing it.”
I stare at the treehouse, memories rising in fragments of when I helped Grandpa build it all those years ago. Bare feet on warm wood. Adele’s voice calling me in for lunch, and Harry fixing the ladder for the third time in one summer.
“She would’ve loved how it’s taken over,” Harry says, following my gaze.
“I should’ve let it be,” I concede. “Didn’t like anything that reminded me of being a kid.”
He smiles, just a little. “You get sentimental with age, it’s unavoidable.”
We work in silence for a while.
It’s never small talk with Grandpa. He doesn’t ask how I’ve been or if I’m hungry. He knows. Of course I’m hungry. Of course I’ve been stubborn. Of course I’ve been avoiding this place again, like if I stay away long enough, the ghosts might forget how to find me.
The winter sun isn’t strong, but it filters through the high trees overhead.
“I saw that gala announcement,” Grandpa says eventually. “Something about a fundraiser for a sick kid?”
“Yeah,” I murmur, pressing my thumb into the dirt. “Osteosarcoma… Cancer. He’s eight.”
Harry curses softly under his breath. He pulls another weed from the roots, shakes off the soil, and tosses it behind him.
“Didn’t peg you for the black-tie charity circuit, though.”
“Neither did I.”
“Someone rope you in?”
My hand pauses. “You could say that.”
“Ah,” he says, glancing over. His eyes are sharp beneath the brim of the hat, twinkling despite the lines that frame them. “So there’s a woman involved.”
I choose to ignore that; he already knows the answer. Instead, I lean back on my haunches and glance toward the treehouse again, scrutinizing the climbing ivy.
I’ve never been good at things that don’t come with an expiration date. Temporary is easy.
It’s the things meant to last that scare me.
“I don’t remember much before you,” I say quietly.
Harry nods once. “You were seven. Most people wouldn’t.”
“You and Grandma… you didn’t try to replace anything.”
“No,” he says simply. “We just stayed.”
And then, without really meaning to, I follow the thread backward in my mind.
It’s not the first time I’ve tried. Not the first time I’ve come out here, looked at the treehouse, and tried to remember anything before it.
But it’s always just fragments.
The red of a tail light, my mother’s scarf on the dashboard. The sound of my dad’s laugh, though it’s distant and warped now, like hearing it underwater.
Sirens.
Cold.
But mostly, I remember Adele’s arms around me. The softness of her cardigan and the tremble in her breath. Harry’s dependable voice, cutting through the noise like an anchor, his arms folding around both of us like he could shield us from whatever came next.
Everything good came after that.
I barely remember my parents, but I remember her hands. His voice.
The smell of thyme and fresh-cut wood.
And maybe that’s what love looks like. It isn’t loud, it doesn’t demand or dazzle. It’s the people who become permanent when everything else falls away.
Who tend what needs tending and let the rest grow wild.
Grandpa nudges my shoulder with his elbow.
“You’re thinking too hard again, kid.”
I huff a breath. “Probably.”
He smiles, satisfied.
“Good. Means you’re alive.”