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“You do that.”

They smiled at each other.

“I love you, Cassie,” Izzy said, the words offered without any embarrassment or awkwardness.

“I love you too, Izzy,” Cassie said.

Izzy nodded once and wandered back across the parking lot and into her room.

When she entered her own room Cassie found she was lonely and in need of company. So she opened the door again and returned to her old home, to see her grandfather one last time.

Home (2013)

Cassie went home. To the place, to the person.

It was many years before, and almost a year after she had met her grandfather in the diner with Drummond. She stepped through a doorway onto the porch of her house, back in Myrtle Creek. It was night in late summer, and she could hear the buzz of insects. The air was moist and cool, and she could tell from the smell of damp earth that it had recently stopped raining.

Cassie walked along the porch and sat on one of the old wooden chairs at the corner. She could see her grandfather’s workshop from there. The light was on, the window of the workshop glowing like a lantern in the dark night. She could hear banging and movement, her grandfather tidying up for the night after Cassie had gone to bed. Or gone to her room, because Cassie didn’t always go to sleep when she went to her room. She would sit up late, reading, long after her grandfather had turned in. But Cassie’s room was on the other side of the house, with a window that looked out on the trees. And that other, younger Cassie would be in another world, caught up in the lives of the characters in whatever book she was reading.

After a few minutes the light in the workshop switched off and her grandfather emerged through the large front door. The workshop had been a garage once, before her grandfather had converted it, but it stillretained the same door. Her grandfather locked up and then walked across the yard to the house, his head down, his arm swinging by his side. Somewhere off in the woods a bird called in the night, a lonely but somehow comforting sound, and her grandfather looked in that direction as he stepped up onto the porch. And then he looked the other way toward where Cassie was sitting, and he stopped in his tracks. She faced him and their eyes met.

He was thinner than when she had last seen him, she was sure. He was within a year of his diagnosis now. The cancer was already inside him, changing him. Eating him. She wondered if he felt it. If he knew.

He walked along the porch, the wood creaking under his weight, and he sat down next to her on the other chair. There was a small table between them, and Cassie remembered how they would sometimes sit out there together and drink bottles of Coke, particularly in the summer, when it was warm and light. But it was dark now, and the only light came from the kitchen window behind them.

“I thought it was you,” her grandfather said. “I mean, the other you. I thought you’d gotten out of bed.”

“No,” Cassie said, her voice low. “I’m still there. Probably reading.”

“Yup,” her grandfather said. He was studying her closely again. “Maybe it’s just the light, or maybe it’s my eyes, but you look older.”

“I am,” she admitted. “It’s been ten years for me, since I saw you in Matt’s.”

“Wow,” he said. He relaxed back into the chair, and it creaked with his weight. Together they gazed out at the drive, the main road a short distance away. A truck passed in the silence, heading south toward Myrtle Creek. Then her grandfather spoke again. “I’d decided I’d imagined the whole thing,” he said. “Meeting you. I’d decided it had to be a dream or...”

“Or what?”

“I don’t know.Something.Because anything made more sense than this. But here you are again.”

“It wasn’t a dream.”

“I know,” he said.

“How are you?” Cassie asked. “How are you feeling?”

He took a moment before replying, and his answer seemed guarded somehow: “Fine. Same as always.”

She wanted to tell him he looked thin. She wanted to tell him to go to the doctor, but she knew he didn’t want to know. And she knew that she couldn’t change the past. Too many things that she now was and now knew were connected all the way back to what had happened to her grandfather. It was a chain that couldn’t be broken. Time travel didn’t work that way, she knew.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I just wanted to feel like I was at home again. That I still had a home.”

He said nothing to that. Then he reached across and put a hand on hers.

“I have to do something hard and scary,” she said. “I think maybe I just wanted to remember what it was like before there was anything hard and scary in the world, before I do it.”

“Life is full of hard and scary things,” he said. “Sometimes you know you are going to face something hard and scary.” He nodded and Cassie thought he was talking to himself as much as to her. “But you have to get on with it. No point bitching and moaning. Get it done.”