Finding Your Heart

Casey stood on the deserted street and stared at the house. It had changed in eighteen years. Not that she had expected it to look as it had when she'd lived there. She knew full well that nothing ever remained the same. The first time she'd ever been in the house, she'd been two. Her parents were thinking of buying the new structure even though it lay at the end of the tract with no other houses to its left. Her oldest brother had held her up to the ceiling and she'd laughed and put her hands on it, leaving behind one slightly grubby palm print. The print had stayed on the ceiling for many years.

The cold wind whipped past her, blowing her inky hair into her face. She tucked the strands behind her ear and tried to ignore the rough white ones she could feel threaded through the silky ones. Tucking her leather gloved hands into her armpits, she hugged herself, keeping her jacket wrapped tightly around her torso.

The street lay in semi-darkness, the streetlights not yet on and twilight in full swing. Further down the street, a few houses blinked with Christmas lights. The one in front of her remained dark, the yard a mass of mud from the recent rains and an owner who seemed to be in the process of re-landscaping the sloping expanse of what had once been the lawn. The house itself didn't welcome. It was run down, with chipped paint, at least one cracked window pane and a sagging garage door. However, a dumpster sat in the driveway so perhaps the new owner intended to renovate the place.

Casey didn't really care if the house was being cared for or not. The people who had lived there had been who she cared for and they were all long gone. Her brother Tim. Her sister Jean. Her parents. Everyone was gone. Not just gone from the house and gone from her life, but gone from the wretched world that still held her in its unfeeling grasp.

She stared harder at the rundown house and the sensation that she stared at herself grew stronger by the second. The house was her. Once proud and beautiful. Now, worn down and broken. Once filled with laughter and love. Now, housing only bitter memories.

A shudder shook her and tears welled. She brushed them away almost angrily. What good did it do to cry or rail at fate for what had become of her? She couldn't turn back the clock and change her path. She couldn't go back and find the heart she'd lost along the way. All she could do was continue to put one foot in front of the other and endure until her time to leave this world arrived. At times, like this dark, forlorn night, she wished it would come sooner rather than later because she was tired, so very tired of living.

She'd driven many miles that day just to stand on the street she'd grown up on and stare at the house she'd called home until the day she'd been forced from it by death and debt. She'd been happy there and she still thought of the town as home, despite the fact that she hadn't lived there in eighteen years and hadn't stepped foot inside the city limits in ten years. She realized as she gazed upon the changed house and yard that all these years she'd not really yearned for home as in the town or the house, but the people. Her mother and father, sister and brother were what felt like home even though they were gone now. Home was also her best friend Kate and...Paul.

Oh, God. Paul.

Casey's eyes closed on a wave of pain. Nearly twenty years had passed and still his loss affected her. Not in the same way it had when she'd first left her hometown. And not in the same way it had when she'd returned ten years ago and he'd asked her to come home. No, this pain had a dull, ragged edge of resignation to it.

You couldn't go home again.

Casey had no idea who had coined that phrase, but its clear intent was true. She certainly couldn't go home. It held nothing she needed and everything she didn't want. She'd lost her heart here and over the years that loss had become the one thing that sucked the life from her bit by bit until now at forty, nothing but a dark, empty place resided within her. She didn't even know why she stood there on the street she'd lived on for more than twenty years, in front of the house she'd grown up in, on a cold, windy New Year's Eve when most people were someplace warm with friends and family.

All Casey knew was that her fight with Allie on the phone had drained what little hope she had left for some kind of peaceful holiday. Of course, Allie wouldn't want to be with her mother on New Year's any more than she'd wanted to be with her on Christmas. She'd rather be with her friends and boyfriend than with her mother. And of course, she put up a fight about it. Allie was contentious about most things that had to do with Casey. She called her mother selfish and whiny then proceeded to lecture Casey about getting a life of her own so she could butt out of Allie's. Her parting shot was that she didn't need her mother any longer.

A long sigh escaped Casey and she sank in on herself like a deflating balloon. She hadn't whined, had she? She didn't think she had, but these days, her perceptions of herself were so skewed she hardly knew the truth of the matter. And it all boiled down to the same thing in the end. Casey alone on a street four hundred plus miles from the place she resided, which wasn't any more of a home than any other place she'd lived since she left the house she'd grown up in. The house she now stared at wistfully in the growing darkness.

A tear escaped and she angrily scrubbed it from her cheek. No crying! she scolded herself. She took a step back, deciding she had best get back in her car and head to the hotel. She had a long drive ahead of her on New Year's Day after she visited the graves of her family. Hopefully, New Year's travelers would be in the minority and she could have the road mostly to herself.

As she turned toward her silver Honda, a faint light came on in the house. Startled, she looked back and saw a bouncing light inside the structure, the light growing larger as it reached the front door. The battered wood creaked open and a man came out. He locked the door and turned to face the street. In his hand was a huge flashlight, the source of the light inside the house. With the flashlight casting a big, bright circle of light, Casey couldn't make out anything more than the outline of the man behind it.

Tall and lean, his dark shadow came down the front steps with an arrogant, cock-first stride that made Casey's breath catch in her throat. He skirted the mud pit of a yard and headed down the driveway toward the street. The swinging beam of the big flashlight spanned the narrow street and illuminated her for a moment. She gasped, blinded. Blinking away the spots before her eyes, she saw that the man had stopped walking and now stood staring at her. He reached up and tugged at the neck of his t-shirt as if looking for a chain at the base of his throat. Then he dropped his hand, squared his shoulders and crossed the street, coming directly toward her.

Casey trembled and took a step back on the sidewalk. She knew that walk. She knew the man. She decided she should pinch herself because she had to be dreaming. The man coming toward her had been every fantasy she'd ever had. She'd never imagined herself with movie stars or other celebrities as many women did. She only ever fantasized about this man. The man she'd lost.

He came to a halt on the asphalt, no more than three feet from where she stood on the sidewalk. He turned the flashlight off and shook his dark head slowly, almost wonderingly.

"Casey McLean."

His voice sounded the same, deep and sexy and it had the same effect on her that it had twenty years before. Her panties became a sodden mess. He took a step closer and she could see a glint in his dark eyes.

She wanted to say his name aloud but her lips didn't work. Neither did her tongue or her brain. She tried again.

Paul.

Nothing came out, but in her head, she'd screamed his name.