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AVA

“M

om, are you sure the Wi-Fi will work?” I looked at Hailey in the rearview mirror. Snuggled under a mound of blankets and pillows, she looked back at me through eyes as gray as my own.

“I’m positive.” I laughed as I answered the question for the thirtieth time. “The tech should be there a few hours after we get there.”

She nodded and returned her attention to her game. I stared at the road in front of us, ready for the long drive to be over. We’d left New Mexico ready for a new start. Hopefully, going back to Black Claw would give us that. A second chance.

My mind drifted to my time living in Black Claw. Some of my fondest memories took place there. Unfortunately, some of my worst were there as well.

“Talk to me, kiddo.” I looked at her in the mirror again as she rolled her eyes. She grinned at the same time and I knew she wasn’t throwing me attitude. I didn’t think the child had enough attitude in her whole body to make me mad. “Keep my attention.”

She’d had a sweet, caring disposition since birth. That made the eventual conversation we had to have about her father all the more heartbreaking. She knew we’d left him, but she didn’t know the details. Eventually, I’d have to tell her.

I’d told her brother about his father about the age she was now. But she was so much more sensitive than he was at eight. I hesitated and kept putting it off.

“Why do you need me to keep your attention?” she asked.

Maddox, my son, shifted in the passenger seat and pushed his earbuds farther into his ears.

I ignored him in favor of talking to Hailey. He’d had a rough year and had been more and more closed off.

“Because I get hypnotized by the road,” I explained. “And it makes me want to fall asleep.”

“You could let Maddox drive,” she suggested.

I shook my head. “I’d rather drive myself. He can drive in town more.”

She shrugged.

“What are you looking forward to about living in Colorado?” I asked.

She pursed her lips and looked out the window at the trees rushing by. They’d already begun to turn from green to yellows and golds, even though it was still summer. “Snow.”

“Oh, good choice. I loved the snow.” I’d spent every summer in Black Claw with my grandmother, but my mother had also driven us up the mountain for Christmas break as well.

The mountains were always full of snow. I’d beg to go out, then knock on the door ten minutes later, begging to come back in, half-frozen. Nana always had a mug of hot chocolate and tugged off my layers of clothing just to put them back on in a few hours when I asked to go play in the snow again. She had the patience of a saint. “It’ll snow before you know it, and we’ll build a snowman.”

“We can pretend he’s real,” she said, and I glanced at her in the mirror long enough to see her eyes twinkle.

The merriment had faded the next time I looked. “What if I don’t make any friends?” she asked. “They might not like me.”

“The school is small,” I said. “So, the kids don’t have a whole lot of other kids to play with. You’ll be popular, I’m sure of it.” I was sure. She’d made fast friends her entire life. Every time I turned around, she asked me to have a sleepover.

“I guess,” she muttered, and went back to her tablet. I chuckled and glanced at Maddox. He was leaned against the window with his eyes closed, the ever-present white earbuds still in his ears, playing some metal or rock song or another. He’d gotten that from my ex-husband, who had been a big fan of music.

I thought about poking him to get him to talk to me a while, but his year had been so rough that I wanted to let him rest. I also wasn’t sure I was ready for a deep conversation with him; he felt so guilty about the move.

His temper and demeanor reminded me so much of his father at that age, it made my throat close. His father had only been about a year older than Maddox when he’d left me, disappearing without a trace. Maddox looked like him, enough to remind me of him pretty much every day of his seventeen years of life. He’d been raised by my now ex-husband, Hailey’s father, but that didn’t make him any less a Kingston in looks.

I kept myself alert over the next hundred miles or so by reflecting on the last couple of years of my marriage—they hadn’t been pretty.

But Black Claw was our fresh start. Our new life.

After we’d moved out and left Hailey’s dad, Maddox’s behavior had grown worse and worse. I hoped having a new, clean slate would help him.

Maddox sat up without warning, startling me. My hand jerked on the wheel, making the whole car jolt. He looked at me with one eyebrow arched. “Sure you don’t want me to drive?”

“Ha, ha,” I drawled.

“Can we get something to eat?” he asked. “I’m starving.”

I glanced at the clock on the dash. “We just ate a couple of hours ago,” I said. I’d stopped for fast food on the way.

He shrugged. “I’m hungry again.”

That boy was going to break the bank in food. Luckily, he had his father’s metabolism. If he’d gotten mine, he’d have been three hundred pounds by now. I had to count every dang calorie. “We’ll get a pizza when we get to town,” I said. “Why don’t you look up the pizza places, and we can call when we’re about thirty minutes out?”

He nodded and picked up his phone. “There’s a place that has New York style,” he said a few minutes later. “They’ve got good reviews.”

“Okay. We’re about an hour away.” I pulled off the interstate onto the highway that would lead us straight to our new home.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” he asked. He’d asked me several times already, from the moment I told them we were moving.

The question was beginning to try my patience, but I sucked it in and gave him a sympathetic look. “I think it will be. Use this new place, new people as a chance to have no preconceived notions about you. These people don’t know you and won’t judge you.” The girls here would be just as much trouble though. He was just like his father. The teenage girls in Black Claw had fallen all over Maverick, and the teenage girls at his school had fallen all over Maddox. I’d been afraid for a couple of years that he’d make me a grandmother before my time.

Not that I’d judge. I was nearly eighteen when I found out I was pregnant with him. He was the best thing that had ever happened to me until Hailey came along.

That didn’t mean we hadn’t had many, many conversations about protection, though. No sense in him having a baby too early if he had all the facts and could prevent it.

Every conversation left him mortified and embarrassed. I just gave him condoms every few months and told him not to make me a grandmother. His stepdad had given him the more in-depth birds and bees talk, thankfully.

“Is this place even habitable?” Maddox asked. “Or are we about to go live in a shack?”

“Don’t you remember the cabin?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Not really. Just snippets. But it’s been empty for like eight years, hasn’t it?”

I hadn’t been back to Black Claw in nearly a decade. My grandmother had died the year before Hailey was born, when Maddox was nine. We’d visited her yearly before that. When she was on her deathbed, I’d gone to stay with her for the last few weeks of her life. Then, after I buried her in the family plot, I’d slowly gone through the house and gotten it ready to close up. It was still furnished, but after sitting empty for so long, it was likely going to need repairs.

“I sent in a cleaning company last week,” I said. “Don’t worry. We’ll have to have a repairman out, I’m sure, but in the meantime, it’ll be more than livable.”

“If you say so.”