Chapter Forty
By the time we crossed into Salisbury, my palms were slick against the steering wheel.
I wasn’t used to Carolina summers anymore—the heavy wetness of them, the way the air smelled like standing water and hot dirt.
The humidity here sat against your skin differently than it did in New Orleans.
Down there it felt alive, lush and green.
Here it felt stagnant. Like rebirth and death all at once.
My husband sat beside me with one arm resting against the open window while our son snored softly in the backseat, sticky-faced and exhausted from the flight. Endless rows of tobacco shops and old brick storefronts rolled past outside the windows.
“That theater,” I said absently, pointing toward a faded marquee downtown, “used to do midnight screenings of Rocky Horror every October. Emily snuck me in once when we were sixteen.”
My husband smiled faintly. “You? At Rocky Horror?”
“I contained multitudes,” I said defensively.
“You still do.”
I huffed a laugh through my nose, but my eyes kept moving over the streets. Salisbury looked both exactly the same and entirely wrong. New restaurants sat in buildings I remembered boarded up. The old antique mall had become a vape store. A tattoo shop stood where a florist used to be.
But the bones of the town remained. Old churches with peeling white paint. Telephone poles tangled in black wire. Porches sagging around faded rocking chairs.
The place still looked haunted by itself.
As we drove farther out, the buildings thinned until the town simply gave way to fields. Corn stretched endlessly beneath the gray afternoon sky, tall and green and swaying softly in the wind like water.
Something deep in my stomach tightened. I rolled my window down farther. The smell hit instantly—earth and fertilizer and summer rot.
Home. I hated that my body recognized it that way.
“There,” I said quietly after another mile, nodding toward a squat brick building near the roadside. “That used to be the only place you could get gas or grub for miles.”
The Grill sat abandoned now. Its windows were dark with grime, old advertisements peeling in the sun. The gas pumps had been removed completely, leaving only cracked concrete islands behind.
But I could still see it the way it used to be. Fluorescent lights buzzing against nicotine-yellow walls. Taxidermy hanging crooked above vinyl booths. Smiley laughing behind the counter while grease popped in the kitchen.
“The sign out front used to glow,” I said softly. “‘Hot dogs, cold drink: ninety-nine cents, Prayers: free of charge.’”
My husband glanced toward the building again. “Why’d it close?”
The smile faded from my mouth. I shrugged one shoulder carefully. “Their daughter died. I don’t think they ever recovered from the guilt of it.”
His brows pinched immediately. “Why would they feel guilty?”
I swallowed. Because everyone in Woodland blamed themselves for the dead girls eventually.
“They sent her to the camp where she was murdered.”
“That’s awful,” he said quietly. “Were you friends with her?”
I shook my head. “We went to the same church, but I didn’t know her that well. Emily did.”
He turned toward me slightly. “Wait. You mean the camp Emily—”
“Yes.” I cut him off before he could say the rest.
His mouth closed immediately. “Oh.” Then after a second, another: “Oh.”
That second one carried the full weight of realization.
I could practically feel the pieces clicking together in his head.
He’d never pushed me much about it. About any of it, really.
My husband had always possessed the rare ability to recognize when someone was carrying something fragile and jagged inside themselves.
He rested his arm back against the window. “Do you think you’ll go see Emily while we’re here?”
Cornfields blurred endlessly around us. I kept my eyes on the road.
“It’s a few hours away from Woodland.”
“Yeah,” he said gently. “But she’s your best friend. And it’s not like she can come to us,” he added carefully. “If you want to take a day, I don’t mind sightseeing with Mrs. Hayward.”
I gripped the wheel tighter. “I’ll think about it.” He nodded like that was enough.
The tiny town finally appeared almost without warning. A tiny scattering of buildings interrupted the sea of cornfields, most of them looking smaller than I remembered. I barked out a startled laugh.
“What?” my husband asked.
“There’s a Dollar General now.”
The bright yellow sign sat obnoxiously against the rural backdrop like someone had pasted modern civilization onto the edge of nowhere. And beside it—
“No fucking way,” I muttered. A BP gas station.
My husband laughed softly. “Looks like Woodland joined society while you were gone.”
“Barely.” But something loosened in me at the sight of it. Some tiny irrational comfort in knowing the town had changed at least a little. That it hadn’t sat perfectly preserved all these years waiting for me to return to it.
Mrs. Hayward’s house appeared at the end of a gravel drive lined with drooping willow trees. My chest tightened all over again.
The white paint looked fresher than I remembered. The porch had new railings. Wind chimes clinked softly beneath the awning. And standing outside waiting for us was Mrs. Hayward herself. She waved both arms the second she saw the car.
“Oh thank God,” I whispered, laughing under my breath as I parked. “She’s exactly the same.”
Mrs. Hayward hurried down the porch steps before I’d even gotten the engine off, her floral skirt whipping around her ankles in the wind. Beside her stood a tall gray-haired man I vaguely recognized from Christmas cards and Facebook photos.
Her boyfriend, Greg. The realization still felt strange.
Mr. Hayward had died in 2020 during the pandemic. A cruel lonely death in a hospital room none of us had been allowed into. I’d been eight months pregnant at the time, terrified and swollen and trapped halfway across the country while the funeral happened without me.
The second I stepped out of the car, Mrs. Hayward crushed me into her arms. “Oh sweetheart,” she breathed. “Look at you.” Her boney fingers cupped my face, as she stared bright eyed and cheery at me for a long second.
Then she was opening the backdoor. “And this must be my grandbaby.”
Before I could protest, she’d already lifted my sleepy son into her arms like he truly belonged to her. He blinked at her with heavy confused eyes while she kissed his forehead repeatedly.
“Well hello there, handsome.”
He stared at her solemnly for a second before burying his face into her shoulder. Mrs. Hayward melted instantly. “Oh, he’s perfect.”
My husband laughed as he unloaded suitcases from the trunk. Greg introduced himself warmly before carrying half our bags inside without being asked.
I stood there for one strange suspended moment, listening to cicadas scream from the trees and shrubs while evening sunlight spilled golden across the porch steps.
And suddenly, being back in that house felt less like visiting. It felt like returning. Like some wounded, half-starved version of myself had been waiting there all these years for me to come home and collect her.