Gorgeous Misery (Creeping Beautiful)

Back out on the lane, I slide the key into the mailbox and open the large lid. It creaks on the rusty hinges.

Then I blink a few times. Because it’s not empty. There is a garbage bag filled with cards.

There is no way to stop my smile.

I gather the edges of the trash bag together, haul it out, throw it on the passenger seat, get back in my truck, and start down the lane.

The tires crunch on the driveway and I go slow. Because I want things to be a certain way when I get to the end of the lane and this is it.

The moment of truth.

And when I see the black truck parked in front of the cabin, I make a weird noise. A sob, maybe.

Because he’s here.

He came.

CHAPTER SIX - NICK

BIRTHDAY #18

6 YEARS AGO

Priceless, exquisite, remarkable, extraordinary, exceptional…

The cabin at the end of the wooded lane is a place I could live.

I haven’t spent a lot of time there over the years, but whenever I rolled down that road it always felt like coming home. Which is interesting because if someone asked me where home was, I would not be able to answer. I grew up on a superyacht in the ocean. We would stop places—Bali, Bora Bora, Hawaii, Indonesia, Southern California—but that’s all they were. Just stops.

And none of them felt like home. So I guess if I had to choose a home, I would be forced to choose a room on the yacht instead. Not my bedroom. The cabins were nice—it is a superyacht—but they are not home.

I would choose the swim beach, which is really just a platform on the back of the yacht where you can dive off and get back on. This is where my twin sister, Harper, and I used to spend most of our time if the yacht wasn’t moving.

I think about her a lot these days. I miss her. And I wish I could be a part of her life. I wish I could watch her raise that baby with James and teach Angelica how to behave.

But I gave her up. I gave them all up.

This is what it means to be me. Nick Tate.

I have no home, I have no family, I have no friends.

Of course, I stay somewhere. I own a legit corporate farm in Nebraska and a small house on the edge of one of the far fields.

Harper is still alive, of course. And she has a family, so yeah. I have that family. But my real family—Lauren—she’s been gone for almost a decade now. She was the one who counted.

I know a lot of people. And if I needed something—even something big—probably twenty or thirty of them would help me out, no questions asked.

But they are not friends.

So Wendy Gale and her cabin at the end of the lane in the Kentucky woods smooth almost all of this over. She erases all the asterisks on the words home*, and family*, and friends*. All the qualifiers disappear when I’m with Wendy.

I have been thinking about her a lot this past year. How things between us have changed since Chek died in the last job we did taking out the Company leadership. She is alone now too. But unlike me, she has this place. This home that Chek made for her.

The cabin is old, authentic, and even though there is almost nothing special about it in the traditional sense, everything is special about it in the ways that count. The big porch, the knotty pine, the way the oversized floor boards creak with every step. The woodburning stove, the tin roof, and the woods, of course.

Wendy is the woods.

If anyone asks me from now on where my home is, I will still lie. But in my head, I will be picturing this place. This cabin on the lane in the woods.

I got in last night even though I wasn’t sure Wendy would even be coming home for her birthday this year. She’s a wanderer, like me. And I guess that’s probably my fault. It was the life I gave her when she was a child. So different than the life Chek gave her out here in the woods. When I showed up at the airstrip back when Lauren was just a baby and begged Chek for help, he came through and gave me Wendy.

She made all the difference.

She didn’t have to do anything to make this difference, either. She didn’t have to change Lauren’s diapers, or bathe her, or feed her, or even play with her. It’s like Lauren just knew that two kids and one guy was enough. Me alone, though? Even a baby knew that wasn’t gonna work.

We needed Wendy.

And I would like to think that Wendy needed us. But I have never been convinced that she does.