Hometown Reunion. Lisa Carter

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      A Kiptohanock native, her father had become pastor of the church with a wife and a young son in tow. The wife and son Darcy never knew. Because if they’d lived, Harold Parks would never have married her mother, and Darcy Parks wouldn’t exist.

      She gazed at the ceiling. It was strange to think of herself as not existing. And equally strange to contemplate why she lived and yet her father’s other child had not.

      Over the years, she’d thought a lot about her brother. Would she and Colin have been friends, like the Pruitt siblings? Perhaps the two of them would’ve gone fishing. Hunted for seashells on one of the barrier islands.

      Would he have been bookish like their father? Or athletic like her, who took after nobody on either side of the family? Truth was, dead little Colin Parks had fit in better with her father than she ever would.

      She flung back the thin sheet and swung her legs over the side of the bed. Enough of that. Not given to melancholy, her perennially cheerful mother had raised her to be the same. Darcy was far more comfortable with doing something rather than just being.

      Careful to avoid the pine floorboard that creaked, she quietly dressed lest she awaken her parents. Sunday was her dad’s busiest day, and on Mondays he needed his rest. He continued to maintain the pastoral duties of a much younger man.

      Standing at the kitchen sink eating a banana, she watched the sun rise over the treetops. No lights shone from the Pruitt house, but Everett Pruitt’s charcoal-gray SUV sat in the driveway. Jax’s parents must’ve arrived home last night.

      Brody was too little for kayaking. Jax would need his parents’ help with Brody when he was working.

      The Pruitts had always been great neighbors. Darcy loved Jax’s mother. Gail Pruitt, a busy RN with five rambunctious children of her own, always made room at the table for one more—the lonely only PK.

      Darcy drifted onto the screened porch, stuffing her bare feet into the flip-flops she’d left there last night. Easing the screen door shut behind her, she plodded toward the tree house.

      Underneath the massive oak, the swing moved idly in the desultory breeze blowing in from the harbor. Hand on the railing, she climbed past the lower platform. The wooden steps wound around the tree trunk, and she ascended to her favorite spot on the higher second level. Rising out of the tree canopy, the perch provided a bird’s-eye view of the entire village.

      She settled into one of the lawn chairs she kept there. Not that anyone but her had been here for a long time. The Pruitts had outgrown the tree house. Just as, one by one, they’d each outgrown the need for home. And her.

      How pathetic was it that she still came up here? Almost thirty, she still lived at home. No boyfriend—or prospects for one—and no real life of her own. What did she have to show for the last fourteen years of her life?

      Yet every morning she climbed the tree house stairs. Here, God felt very near. Almost near enough to touch. Almost as close as the clouds overhead. And at night, this was the perfect spot to view God’s starry handiwork.

      She’d spent hours here as a child. Vicariously enjoying the noise, laughter and life emanating from the house next door. But she’d been too shy to venture over, until the day Jax stood at the bottom of the tree and invited her to come play with his little sister.

      “Anna’s always bothering me and Ben,” Jax had called up. “You’d be doing us a favor.”

      Coaxed out, she’d kept a wary eye on the oldest Pruitt boy as she climbed down from the branches. Even from a distance, she knew him to be a charming handful to his mother and his Sunday-school teachers.

      On that sultry summer day she never forgot, the Pruitt kids had smiled at her, their mouths stained purple, red, orange and blue.

      Jax had handed her a slushy freezer pop. “You look like lime-green would be your favorite.”

      Oh so grateful to be included, she took it from him. Thereafter, when the Pruitts broke out freezer pops, the lime-green was forever hers.

      Darcy closed her eyes, remembering. The breeze rustled the leaves of the tree. If only she could recapture those days. Before she’d known about the other family. When she felt loved and chosen, blissfully unaware of her father’s heartache.

      Things between her and Jax had changed his senior year in high school. Under the basketball net at the end of the Pruitt driveway, he’d gotten all over Will, who’d accidentally knocked her down. Jax had never cared before if anyone wiped the concrete with her.

      At youth group, he’d looked at her differently. He would flush when she caught him staring. Drop his eyes. Scuff the toe of his sneaker in the dirt. Awkward, un-Jax-like.

      Then after dinner that spring, he took to climbing into the tree house. They’d sit in silence—again, very un-Jax-like. Watching the fireflies blink around them. Watching the stars wink overhead.

      Small talk at first. Had she seen the game on TV? What did she think about their chances for beating the church league team in nearby Onley next week? Gradually, he’d told her how he wanted to serve his country like his grandfather. How he wanted to see the world and live life without reservations, on the edge.

      He’d painted an irresistible picture of adventure. The kind of adventure she secretly longed for. Living life to the fullest, though part of her shied away from the prospect of leaving everyone and everything behind. Her ideal life would be a balance of the two—home and adventure.

      She’d believed Jax Pruitt was the bravest boy she’d ever known. The most handsome. The most everything.

      A late bloomer, Darcy found that boys didn’t give her much attention. They respected her athletic ability. Admired her tough, never-say-die spirit. But when it came time for the prom, she wasn’t the girl they asked.

      She was flattered, frankly, that Jax Pruitt spent so many of his evenings in the treetop with her. They never held hands or anything like that. He never touched her. They never kissed. Skittish as she was, she would’ve probably decked him if he’d tried. Not that he would’ve tried anything. She was the PK, after all.

      But things between them definitely altered. Beyond the tree house, they’d spent an enormous amount of time together working at his aunt Shirley’s shop that summer. And Darcy had loved every minute of it.

      As a very sheltered, immature sixteen-year-old, she’d had feelings she didn’t know what to do with. She’d dreaded the day Jax would report to Basic at summer’s end.

      Knowing something was coming didn’t always make it better. Like watching a hurricane offshore creep ever closer. Understanding the devastation the day would bring and yet unable to stop it from happening.

      “Wait for me in the tree,” Jax had told her in his husky voice. The voice he used with her. “I’ll be there first thing in the morning to say goodbye.” He’d also promised to write.

      She didn’t sleep that night. She got up early to wait for him in the tree house. He never showed.

      The house next door lay strangely quiet. The Pruitt car had already gone from the driveway. And Jax Pruitt never wrote her. Not once. The old ache resurfaced.

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