Chapter 1 — The Wrong Address
For a moment, Ezra Perkins was certain he had the wrong house.
He sat in the rental car at the curb in Pinecrest with the engine ticking as it cooled, looking at a house he did not recognize as the one he’d grown up in.
The paint was peeling off the siding in long gray strips.
A dark stain of water damage bloomed across the front eave.
On the small porch, a rusty plastic bucket sat catching a slow drip from somewhere above, though it hadn’t rained in days.
He checked the address on his phone twice, and then a third time, because the numbers on the mailbox matched and his mind refused to accept it.
He had imagined this homecoming for the better part of a year.
He had imagined drip coffee and his mother’s cinnamon rolls and his father’s terrible jokes.
He had imagined the moment he told them about the house near Scottsdale — one story, no stairs, a little garden — and watched their faces change.
In the trunk sat a gold watch for his father and a soft wool shawl for his mother, wrapped in paper he’d chosen carefully.
He had come home, after nearly ten years, to give his parents the life he believed he’d already been paying for.
Then his father opened the door, leaning on a wooden cane that had been repaired with wrapped bands of silver duct tape, and Ezra’s whole imagined homecoming went silent inside him like a radio switched off.
His father had always been a big man in Ezra’s memory — broad through the shoulders, a laugh you could hear from the driveway.
The man in the doorway was smaller than the memory in every dimension.
His shirt hung off him.
His wrist, on the cane, was thin as a boy’s.
And his face, when it found his son’s, did something that broke Ezra’s heart clean in half: it filled first with pure, uncomplicated joy, and then, half a second later, with a flicker of worry — as if even now, even seeing his son for the first time in years, some part of him was bracing to apologize for being a burden.