In This Life by Cora Brent

Author:Cora Brent [Brent, Cora]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: novel
Publisher: Cora Brent
Published: 2018-05-12T18:30:00+00:00

Two months. That’s how much time had elapsed since I last got behind the wheel intending to drive straight through several states to get to Hawk Valley.

Back then I’d only known that tragedy had found me for the second time in my life. I didn’t know that once I reached Hawk Valley it would be impossible to leave.

The ten foot van I rented was larger than what I ended up needing. There wasn’t too much I wanted to take with me. Most of the furniture was unnecessary since I didn’t feel like finding a place for it in my dad’s house.

Dad’s house.

When I was a kid, being told I was going to ‘Dad’s house’ would often be met with a groan and a complaint. I preferred my mother’s small Phoenix condo to the sprawling old Victorian house with a view of the mountains. My father was never abusive. Just perpetually exasperated. And openly relieved when it came time to return me to my mother. It must have been a shock for him to go from part time dad to round the clock caretaker of a troubled teen.

Sometimes even now just before I dozed off I would jerk awake and bolt upright, positive that someone was shaking my shoulder in the darkness. There was never anyone there because it was only a memory. On that night, the night my world shattered, my father had awakened me shortly after two a.m. and the most shocking thing was that he was crying.

“Nash. Wake up, son. Something’s happened.”

The moments after that have been blocked out of my mind. I remembered seeing broken things around the house and hearing that I was responsible because after I heard my mother had been killed by her husband I began screaming and running around the house shattering everything I could get my hands on until my dad managed to physically restrain me. By that time I had to go to the hospital to sew up the hand I’d sliced open on a smashed window pane.

Chris Ryan didn’t know what to do with me. Our time together had always amounted to less than two months a year. Now suddenly he was a full time father to an incredibly angry kid. In the beginning he tried. He dragged me to a therapist. He encouraged me to make friends, to go out for sports. I found that I liked sports, that slamming into big guys on a football field or running around on a basketball court helped channel my aggression into something that didn’t involve blood. But friends were an enigma to me. Plenty of people wanted my company and it seemed like the more uncooperative I was the more they sought me out. Especially girls. I couldn’t be proud of the way I’d treated girls back then. I was a jackass.

But that didn’t mean I was willing to accept criticism from a man who’d kicked my own mother to the curb and then entertained a revolving door of girlfriends ever since I could walk.

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