Page 16 of The Life We Left Behind

My feet crunched in the gravel as Cade launched into telling me all about his teammates and how they were super nervous, but he was apparently a rock. He had more confidence than I ever had at his age, and it never failed to astound me.

As I crouched down and retrieved the key from under the mat, my eyes caught on the porch chairs, which sat empty. The usual blankets were missing, and the potted plants that had dotted the porch were also gone.

I straightened up and looked around me, seeing all the differences. The flower beds were mostly empty. They hadn’t been tended this season, and even though some of the evergreens had flourished, they looked wrong without the colorful flowers that would usually have littered them.

Frowning, I unlocked the door and pushed open the front door.

“Mom?” Cade’s voice broke through my distraction.

“Sorry, monkey. I was just looking at Grandpa’s yard.”

“Is it nice?”

“It’s…different. There used to be so many flowers here, but he must not have planted them this year.”

“I can’t wait to come and see the farm,” he suddenly burst out. “I want to see your bedroom. Aunty Blake says it’s full of posters ofboys, but I told her there’s no way.”

I laughed, knowing that Blake was right. I was pretty sure there were still a couple of posters tacked up on the wall in there, unless my dad had taken them down.

“You might be sorely disappointed there, squirt.”

“Ugh, really?”

“Hey, I was a kid the last time I lived here.”

I stepped through the front door, frowning as I saw the stack of neatly labeled boxes in the hallway.

“Mom? Are we going to live on the farm now?”

“What? No. What makes you think that?”

He was silent for a moment, and I could hear him shuffling around in the background. “I just thought it might be nice. Maybe you might want to be at home again.”

“I have a home already, monkey. And it’s with you.”

“Well, I’d be living there too.”

There was something he wasn’t telling me, but I equally knew if he hadn’t told me straight away, I was going to have to wait until I saw him to get it out of him.

“We can talk about it when you get here, okay? Can I talk to Aunty Blake?”

“Sure.”

There was a crash of a door and the thud of his running feet over the phone line, and I chuckled, knowing he was charging out of his bedroom to where Blake was probably drinking her coffee in the kitchen.

“Look, I know what you’re going to say, but there was jelly in them, and that’s practically a fruit,” Blake blurted out as soon as she was on the line.

“I wasn’t going to say anything! I just wanted to make sure that Cade had been okay last night? I’ve never left him like this, and he just lost his grandfather and?—

“Del, calm down. He’s absolutely fine. The kid’s resilient. You know he is.”

She was right. Besides, even though Cade loved his grandpa, he didn’t have the same bond with him that I did. And it was my fault that he didn’t.

I shook my head to try to shake the guilt free. I wouldn’t keep going over this. There was nothing I could do to change things now apart from making sure that Cade knew the amazing man his grandfather had been. “Okay, call me if he needs absolutely anything.”

“You know I will. How’s the old house?”

“It’s weird.” I walked into the living room and saw exactly what I’d expected as I moved to peer through the kitchen door. “He’d already packed most of the house up. It’s so quiet here. I haven’t looked at much of the farm, but from the sound of it, I’d say he’s sold the animals. It’s strange to see everything so…empty.”

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