When she woke up the next morning in the Walkers' house, for one brief, panicky moment she thought they had deposited her sleeping body the night before in the daughter's bedroom. But a quick survey of the room revealed only the bland furnishings of a guest bedroom: a white cotton quilt for the bed, a dark blue woven rug, rosewood furniture that looked like it had been inherited from someone's grandmother, and for the walls a cross-stitch sampler of a Bible verse that had faded with time and an over-abundance of the morning sunlight that was now streaming through the window and insisting that she greet the day.

She groaned out loud at this, the thought of confronting the fall out from the night before in the stark light of daytime. She was pregnant, she didn't know who the father was, Cam not only knew she was sleeping with his father but had declared his love for her, and her house and what few belongings she had had been swept away, or at least seriously damaged, by a killer tornado.

Well, not killer, but close enough. It had certainly killed her spirit.

"Oh shit!" she cried, sitting up straight in her bed and slapping her forehead as one more detail from the previous day surfaced in her groggy memory. "Christie!"

Her sister was on her way.

She cast about wildly for her phone and found it on the bedside table; someone had thoughtfully plugged it in with a borrowed charger. But there was nothing, no missed calls, no unread text messages. She even checked her voicemail, a practice she avoided whenever possible, but the impending threat of her sister's visit egged her on.

"You have 27 new messages," the robotic voice glumly announced. Beginning, of course, with the oldest ones first. She groaned, but soldiered through, mashing the delete message button as quickly as possible on each new message so she wouldn't have to listen to each unreturned call and wallow in shame and embarrassment.

It didn't matter, however; she was still treated to the opening lines of 18 missed calls (thankfully the other nine were hang-ups).

She hadn't checked her voicemail since the end of the last semester of school, so she was able to chart the narrative of her strange, sad summer through the ghostly voices of callers past. Most of them were her sister's haranguing her to call back; when she reached July there were a few from hometown friends she had successfully avoided, including one from a college friend inviting her to dinner at her brand new apartment in Brooklyn that she had bought with her brand new husband to accommodate their brand new baby. She cringed when she listened to that one in particular, both from the pain of her own losses and the knowledge that she was a total asshole for ignoring her friend's invitation.

Then she got to the second week of July, and her mother's death. A cut off voicemail from her sister, another from the funeral home, a third from her ex-fiancé who had called to ask her something, except she would never know because she held the phone as far away from her ear as she could while frantically pushing the delete button.

She cautiously brought the phone back to her ear but the message had been successfully deleted, the robot lady's voice informed her (rather sullenly, she thought). But before she could breathe a sigh of relief and steel herself for what would come next Cam's lazy drawl spoke to her. She gasped in surprise and barely stopped herself in time from reflexively smashing the delete button.

Cam had called her. Over a month ago. While she was in New Jersey.

Suddenly the robot lady was asking her if she wanted to save or delete, and she realized she hadn't heard a word of what he had said in his message to her, aside from "Hey there Miss Park ..."

She hit the replay button, and there it was, Cam's voice asking her how she was, hoping her trip to New Jersey was turning out alright, that his father was asking after her as well. And then he told her to call him back "if you have the chance ma'am," and that was it.

End of transmission.

***

She had never intended to sleep with her ex-fiancé. With Freddy. When he showed up at the funeral she hadn't been surprised—everyone shows up at funerals, including exes. How else were you supposed to make sure that there would be people at your own?

Of course, that wasn't like Freddy at all. Kind, gentle, strong, good. Freddy was all those things. He had always been better than her, she had known that from the beginning, when she met him at a Thai restaurant for a blind date that her sister had set up. Freddy and Christie had been coworkers, both of them nurses at the same hospital; Courtney had actually spent a good portion of their evening peppering him with questions about her sister's work habits, forever puzzled by the idea of Christie in any sort of official caregiving role. Their mother was still hale and hearty at that point, her memory only beginning to slip and slide over the little things, nothing to be too worried about. Their father had died slowly, from cancer, but their mother had been reluctant to let her daughters help her manage his illness and painful death, increasingly possessive of her husband's time and attention as the disease ate away at his insides.

Freddy had answered her questions good naturedly and assured her that her sister was brusque and efficient but also popular with the other nurses and even some of the patients. He was handsome—beautiful really, with thick black hair, sharp cheekbones, and a fine-boned face, so beautiful she couldn't help but be self-conscious, wondering if the server was smirking at the obvious mismatch between them.

And he was Korean. Korean-American, but both his parents were from Korea.

"Not a mutt like us," Christie had announced triumphantly after wrangling a yes out of her the week before. "100 percent the real thing!"

She had only rolled her eyes at her sister—she herself had married a blonde haired, blue eyed Midwesterner after all—but she soon understood what Christie had meant, why it might actually be a good thing to date a guy like that. While most people in her life had no problem relating to the white side of her, the part she had inherited from their mother, the Korean side she mostly kept to herself unless she was around her father's side of the family, who were few and far between. With Freddie, all of that poured out of her without hesitation, and by the end of dinner they were comparing notes on crazy, rosary bead-counting aunties and confusing childhood trips to Korea.

And of course he reminder her of her father. His way of speaking softly, his gentle kindness, the heart he wore so openly on his sleeve. How could she not fall for Freddy? How could she not agree to marry him, to move in with him, to carry his child?

But deep down, she had always known that she was wrong for him, and not only because of his luminescent beauty, the kind that turned heads both male and female when they were out and about. Feelings—whether positive or negative, whether they belonged to her or to another—they were a language she had never learned to speak and to understand, not in any real way. Enough to get by in the day-to-day world. But once the traumas and the losses began to line up and hit her quick and hard she ran out of words, and retreated into silence.

After she had left him and the home they had built together she had never looked back. When she spotted him at her mother's funeral service that was the first thing that came to her mind: Does he know I never regretted leaving him behind?

Later, in the parking lot outside the funeral home, they had spoken some, of her year in Texas, of her mother's stroke, of Freddy's new job at a hospital in Manhattan and his new apartment there. It was the kind of conversation that people have with someone they separated from years before, and she was careful not to catch his eye so she wouldn't be forced to see in his face the old familiar questions she still couldn't answer for him.

***

A firm knock on her door brought her back to reality, and looking down at her phone she realized that if her sister had left a message with her flight details then she had deleted it without listening.

She mumbled a curse word and opened the door to find Kyle Walker standing there, his eyebrows raised in mock surprise.

"She's alive," he said, then smiled and walked away toward the kitchen. "Come on, soup's on."

"Soup?" she blurted. "Wait, what time is it? Is it the afternoon already?"

"Nah, it's just his weird way of saying it's time for breakfast," Cam's voice called from the kitchen, followed immediately by what sounded like half a dozen pots and pans crashing to the ground.

"Goddammit boy, get out of my kitchen!"

She stopped at the kitchen doorway to watch Cam quickly picking up a collection of sauce pans and lids while his father stood over him with his arms crossed, looking annoyed.

"Yes sir, right away sir!" Cam said, stacking a few on the kitchen counter and turning around to address her.

"You better come too," he said with a wink and a nod toward a glassed in back porch she hadn't noticed during her previous visit in the night. "My dad gets ornery in the morning before he has his coffee."

A nagging thought followed her into the porch, where an outdoor dining table was set for breakfast. When she sat down at the table it sat down with her, still picking at her brain. Finally she realized: it was the first time she had ever seen father and son interact with each other. Scratch that, it was the first time she had ever even seen them in the same ROOM together!