Forgiving Paris: A Novel(8)

“Thanks for your help.” Ashley had always been closest to Kari, and today was no exception. “You understand, right? The reason this is hard.”

The smile Kari had kept in place most of the day faded. She hugged Ashley once more, longer this time. “Of course. I was the first to hug you when you walked through the front door home from Paris the first time. Remember?”

“I do.” Ashley felt tears gather in her eyes, but she blinked them back. “It’ll be fine. Landon’s always wanted me to go back, to make peace with the city.”

“With more than the city.” Kari studied her. “It’s time.”

Ashley nodded. “I know. Thanks again.” She stepped back and watched Kari get into her car and drive off. The trip to Paris still troubled her. Maybe if she told Kari the details she’d kept secret for twenty-three years, this conversation would be different. Her sister might even tell her to stay home. But there was no verifying the part she never talked about. How could it harm her now, so many years later? The whole thing might’ve been only in her imagination.

Something Ashley should’ve forgotten by now.

When Kari’s car was out of sight, Ashley turned to the old Baxter house, the place where she and Landon and their kids had lived for so many years. Ever since her father had married dear Elaine, and the two had bought their own home nearby.

Looking at the house from this vantage point—out front and with time on her hands—Ashley let the happy memories come. She could see herself and her siblings spilling out of the family van the day they moved here when she was ten. Back when she thought home could never be anywhere but the place they’d left in Michigan.

The next morning their moving van had been late, and her father had come up with a quick idea. “Let’s paint the porch! We can all work together!”

Dad had gotten buckets of white paint and half a dozen brushes, and they slopped and painted and spilled enough paint over the porch until finally it looked brand new. Then the five of them—Brooke and Kari, Ashley and Erin and Luke—had all run out back to the creek and washed off. But not before they’d found the big rock at the stream’s edge. The handprints they’d left there that day were mostly rubbed off from weather and time.

But in her mind, Ashley could still see them as clear as they’d been that long-ago day.

She blinked and the view of the front porch changed, and she could see herself getting into the car to go buy milk… and Luke’s friend Jefferson Bennett was running behind her. “Can you give me a ride home, Ashley?” There had been no warning, no way to know that Ashley’s life and his would never be the same again. That a drunk driver would cross the line and Jefferson would jerk the wheel and take the hit. Or that the sixteen-year-old boy would live just a week longer before leaving them.

Another blink and Ashley pictured herself stepping out of her parents’ SUV two summers later with a pair of suitcases and a pregnant belly, home from Paris. Ashley could see the girl she’d been back then. Without faith or hope or a desire to ever come home. Yet there she was, surrounded by the love of her mom and dad. Heading back through the doors of the house she had still loved so well.

And she could see the time Landon walked up the stairs of that porch and into the house after Kari married Tim… a million years ago. Ashley breathed deep. Of course she painted what she felt. The memories were a part of her life here at the old Baxter house.

When her dad and Elaine decided to sell, Ashley and Landon were the only adult kids interested in buying it. The only ones willing to live on the ten acres and take care of the place. Of course, the two of them had jumped at the chance.

Ashley would never grow tired of looking at the old house, the white wood siding and pretty gables, the dark roof and white wraparound porch. The solid double mahogany front doors. Their home had gone up in value in recent years, but she and Landon would never sell it. The memories inside those walls and windows were simply priceless.

Ashley took her time walking across the expansive front yard and up the porch steps. She and Landon would be home from Paris before she knew it, back here in Bloomington, where her work came to life. There was nothing to fear in Paris. Those shadowy dark days were decades ago.





CHAPTER FOUR


At least there is hope for a tree: If it is cut down, it will sprout again, and its new shoots will not fail.

—Job 14:7



Jack Ryder didn’t care if he died.

That was why he was the best special agent in the San Antonio FBI. Jack took chances where other agents were careful. He was bold where the rest shrank back. He lived for the mission. At twenty-six, his superiors all told him the same thing.

They’d never had an agent like him.

Jack was a chameleon. He could grow out his beard and get intel on a Middle Eastern weapons cache. Cut his hair and shave and work undercover drug busts at a high school. Wear tennis shoes and ripped-up jeans and fit in on any college campus.

Since his twenty-third birthday, Jack had been working for the FBI, and in the past few years he’d moved to undercover missions, one after another. Oliver had told him that agents who joined the bureau younger than age twenty-five rarely lasted, and that typically an agent had to be at least thirty to succeed at undercover work.

At every point, Jack was the exception.

Lately his missions were focused on international drug and sex-trafficking rings that also did business in the United States. The missions were getting more dangerous. That was okay with Jack. If there was a God, He had intended Jack for this job alone.