Last Chance Hero. Melinda Di Lorenzo

corner. The same elementary school across from the same high school.

      Donovan had a hard time believing that at one point in his life, he’d never been farther than the town limits. Even harder to wrap his head around the idea that he’d never wanted to.

      Of course, it had never been Ellisberg itself that’d held him.

      His eyes slid back to Jordynn.

      Twelve years old.

      That was his age when he first realized he’d fallen in love with her. He’d wooed her patiently through their teen years, waiting for her to clue in that it was a forever kind of deal. The easy stuff came first. Movies and stolen kisses and handholding. Then there’d been the complicated stuff. Lovemaking and naming babies they hadn’t had. And the serious stuff. Saving the money from his paper route, then from pumping gas at the local station, until he finally had enough to pay for the promise ring he gave her on her sixteenth birthday.

      Donovan had never cared when people called them crazy, or said they were too young. He’d known what he’d wanted and that it would never change.

      “Until it did.”

      He didn’t realize he’d spoken aloud until she answered him. “What?”

      “Nothing, honey,” he said quickly. “Just thinking aloud.”

      She glanced his way, then back out the front again, then spoke in a shaky voice. “Did you really come back for my mom’s funeral?”

      He closed his eyes for a second before answering. “I needed to know that you were okay.”

      “Didn’t you know already that I wasn’t? That I hadn’t been for eight years already?” The quaver had become a slightly angry one.

      “I hoped you’d be healing,” he told her. “But I just...”

      “What?”

      “I kept thinking about when your mom was first diagnosed, and how you told me losing her would break you. I had to come.”

      She inhaled a breath that somehow echoed through the car. “And what would’ve happened if you’d found me and I wasn’t dealing with it well?”

      He stared out the windshield, then shook his head. “I honestly don’t know.”

      She went silent for a moment, then said, “If I ask you something else, will you be honest about that, too?”

      “I can try.”

      She sighed, said a near-silent, “I guess that will have to do,” then she swallowed.

      “These men who are after you—after us, I guess—is it because you did something wrong?”

      He felt himself hesitate, bogged down by years of guilt. A decade of questioning every move he’d made since that night. And on the night itself. Wondering so often if his moral code had let him down. If it had been skewed by emotion. Hell. He’d woken up countless nights in a cold sweat, haunted by the decision he’d been forced to make all that time ago.

      Had he done something wrong? Maybe. Probably more than one thing.

      But not the way she means, he told himself.

      And he sure as hell wouldn’t go back and change any of it.

      “Dono?”

      Her concern-tinged voice drew him back to the present. Jordynn’s safety had been—and remained—the most important thing to him. He loosened his balled-up hands and placed them flat on his thighs.

      “Nothing is black-and-white,” he said gruffly. “But the reason they’re after me has nothing to do with anything I did.”

      “Not something you did?”

      “Nothing I did,” he said, changing the emphasis just enough to change the meaning, too.

      She wasn’t buying it. “Either way, I don’t think you really answered my question.”

      He winced. She’d never been anything but smart and intuitive. It made her excellent at reading him. One of the reasons Donovan loved her, and one of the reasons he hadn’t been able to stay.

      “Did you do something wrong?” Jordynn asked again.

      He couldn’t quite make the word no come out. At his silence, hurt flashed across her face.

      “Do you know why I was okay, after my mom died?” she said.

      Donovan didn’t want to hear the answer; he was sure he knew already. “Honey.”

      “It was because the worst thing had already happened,” she told him. “Because you were dead, and there was nothing left to break.”

      Guilt—white-hot and furious—stabbed at Donovan. Forcefully, he reminded himself that he’d done what he’s done for her sake. For her safety and her life.

      “Honey—” he said again.

      But she cut him off with a cool glare. “Don’t. Please.”

      He nodded and turned to stare out the windshield instead, watching the bright horizon. He didn’t realize until that moment that they’d left the old neighborhood behind—the winding, house-thick streets weren’t even visible anymore, which meant they’d crested the top of the natural basin that held the familiar residential area. It also meant they weren’t headed in the right direction. Donovan’s eyes flicked to the side and found the nearing mountain—full of hiking trails and bubbling streams and not a single place to hide a stolen sedan—and his nerves tightened ever further. They needed the highway. The city and its anonymity. Not the wilderness.

      “We need to turn around,” he said. “At the very least make our way to Salem.”

      Jordynn didn’t look at him, and she didn’t acknowledge the urgency in his voice. “Do you know where we are?”

      Donovan lifted his ball cap and ran his fingers over his mess of hair, then tugged his ear. “Yeah. Not where we should be.”

      “Look again.”

      Frustrated by the hint of stubbornness in her suggestion, but knowing from experience that arguing with her would do no good anyway, he gave the exterior scenery another glance.

      Narrowing road.

      Increased tree cover.

      A few birds overhead.

      No way out!

      He shoved down the internal shout and made himself focus. To see whatever it was Jordynn wanted him to see.

      And there it was. A sign that proclaimed You Are Now Approaching Greyside Mountain Park. And just beyond that—flashing between the thick foliage—a familiar gray structure that made Donovan’s stomach plummet to his knees.