Page 36 of Sinner’s Torment

I drove through town slowly, my eyes scanning the familiar landmarks. There was the diner where I’d worked my junior year. The park where I’d gotten drunk for the first time. The church where my mama had dragged me every Sunday until I’d finally refused to go anymore.

Nothing had changed. And yet everything felt different.

I felt different. Older. Harder. More broken than I’d been when I left.

I passed the town sign—Bethlehem, Connecticut. Population 3,368. Welcome Home—and kept driving, following the winding road that led out of town and into the hills.

My family home came into view a few minutes later, sitting on a patch of land surrounded by trees. The siding was faded, the roof patched in places, but the yard was neat and well-kept. My daddy’s truck sat in the driveway. Mama’s flower garden bloomed along the front porch.

It looked the same as it always had.

Safe. Familiar. Home.

And yet the sight of it filled me with dread so thick I could barely breathe.

I pulled into the gravel driveway and stopped, my hands still gripping the steering wheel, my heart pounding in my chest. I sat there for a long moment, staring at the house, trying to find the courage to get out of the car.

What was I going to say?

“Hey, Mama. Hey, Daddy. I’m back. And oh, by the way, I’m pregnant. No, I’m not married. No, the father isn’t here. Yes, I know I’m a disappointment. Yes, I know you told me so.”

My throat tightened.

I closed my eyes and took a shaky breath.

Please, I thought. Please don’t ask too many questions. Please don’t make me explain. Please just let me stay.

Because I had nowhere else to go.

And I was so, so tired of running.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Brandy

The front door opened before I could force myself out of the car.

My mother appeared first, wiping her hands on a dish towel, her face lighting up with surprise and then concern as she recognized my beat-up Honda. Behind her came my father, tall and broad-shouldered, his work shirt still on from whatever job he’d been doing in the yard. Then my siblings—Duke first, the oldest, his expression immediately shifting from curiosity to worry. Tracy followed, squinting against the afternoon sun. And finally Chris, the baby of the family at twenty-three, though he towered over everyone now.

They all stood there on the porch, frozen for a moment, staring at me through the windshield.

I couldn’t move. My hands were locked on the steering wheel, my body refusing to cooperate with my brain’s commands. Get out. Stand up. Face them.

But I couldn’t.

Because the moment I stepped out of this car, it would all become real. The pregnancy. The running. The fact that I’d come crawling back to the place I’d sworn I’d never return to, exactly as broken and lost as everyone had predicted I’d be.

My mother moved first.

She dropped the dish towel on the porch railing and came down the steps, her pace quickening with each stride. She wasn’t running, but there was urgency in her movements, purpose. The kind of movement only a mother made when she knew there was something wrong with her child.

I watched her approach through the windshield, and something inside me cracked.

All the walls I’d built over the past three days—hell, over the past six years—came crashing down in an instant. The careful control I’d maintained while driving across half the country, the numbness I’d wrapped around myself like armor, the determination to stay strong and figure this out on my own—all of it shattered.

I fumbled with the door handle, my hands shaking so badly I could barely grip it. The door swung open, and I stumbled out, my legs weak and unsteady after so many hours behind the wheel.

And then I saw her face.