Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Mariana Zapata
All Rhodes Lead Here © 2021 Mariana Zapata
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the author is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
This e-book is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 Mariana Zapata
Book Cover Design by RBA Designs
Editing by Hot Tree Editing and My Brother’s Editor
I don’t know how I could have gotten through this last year without you.
Eva, thank you for everything.
Especially your friendship.
Chapter 1
My eyes burned. Then again, they hadn’t stopped stinging since it had gotten dark a couple of hours ago, but I squinted anyway. Coming up ahead, on the very, very edge of my car’s headlights, there was a sign.
I took a deep, deep breath in and let it right back out.
WELCOME TO
PAGOSA SPRINGS
World’s Deepest Hot Springs
Then I read it again just to make sure I hadn’t imagined it.
I was here. Finally.
It had only taken an eternity.
Okay, an eternity that fit into a two-month period. Eightish weeks of me driving slowly, stopping at just about every tourist attraction and two-star hotel or vacation rental along the way from Florida through Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Spending time in Texas and then skipping to Arizona, exploring towns and cities I hadn’t had time to check out in the past when I’d come through. Even visiting an old friend and his family too. I went to Vegas while I was at it because it was somewhere else I had been to at least ten times but had never truly gotten to see. I spent almost three weeks in Utah. Last but not least, I took a week to check out New Mexico before circling back up toward the mountains. To Colorado. My final destination—I hoped.
And now I’d made it.
Or just about made it.
Letting my shoulders sink down, I pushed them back against the seat and relaxed a little. According to the navigation app, I still had another thirty minutes left to get to the place I was renting on the other side of town in the southwest part of the state most people had never heard of.
Home for the next month, or maybe longer if everything worked out the way I wanted it to. I had to settle somewhere after all.
The pictures online of the rental I’d booked were just what I’d been looking for. Nothing big. Not in town. Mostly though, I’d fallen for it because the rental reminded me of the last house Mom and I had lived in.
And considering how last minute I had reserved it, right smack at the start of summer and tourist season, there hadn’t been a whole lot left to choose from—as in, there had been next to nothing. I’d come up with the idea of going back to Pagosa Springs two weeks ago in the middle of the night while the weight of every choice I’d made in the last fourteen years rested on my soul—not for the first time either, more like the thousandth—and I’d fought not to cry. The tears weren’t because I’d been in a room in Moab all by myself with no person who gave a shit about me within a thousand miles. They had sprouted because I’d thought about my mom and how the last time I’d been in the area had been with her.
And maybe just a little because I had no clue what the hell to do with my life anymore and that scared the hell out of me.
Yet that was when the idea had struck.
Go back to Pagosa.
Because why not?
I’d been doing a lot of thinking about what I wanted, what I needed. It wasn’t like I’d had anything else to do being by myself nearly nonstop for two months. I’d thought about making a list, but I was done with lists and schedules; I’d spent the last decade listening to other people tell me what I could and couldn’t do. I was over plans. Done with a whole lot of things and people, honestly.
And just as soon as I had thought of the place that had been home once, I knew that was what I wanted to do. The idea just felt right. I’d gotten tired of driving around, looking for something to set my life back into some semblance of order.
I’d figure it out, I had decided.
New year, new Aurora.
So what if it was June? Who said your new year had to start on January 1st, am I right? Mine had officially started with a lot of tears on a Wednesday afternoon about a year ago. And it was time for a newer version of the person I’d been back then.
That’s why I was here.
Back in the town I’d grown up in, twenty years later.
Thousands of miles away from Cape Coral and everyone and everything in Nashville.
Free to do whatever I wanted to do for the first time in a long, long time.
I could be whoever I wanted to be. Better late than never, right?
I blew out a breath and shook my shoulders to wake myself up a little more, wincing at the ache that had taken them over, back when I’d gotten the rug pulled out from under me, and never left. Maybe I had no real idea of what I was going to do long term, but I was going to figure it out. I couldn’t find it in me to regret my decision to drive here.
There were plenty of things in my life I regretted, but I wouldn’t let this choice be one of them. Even if I didn’t end up staying in the area long term, the month I had reserved in Pagosa Springs was going to be nothing in the grand scheme of life. It was going to be a stepping stool for the future. Maybe a Band-Aid for the past. A boost to the present.
It’s never too late to find a new road, as my friend Yuki sang. I had driven all this way to Colorado for a reason, and nothing was going to be in vain—not my butt cheeks hurting, my shoulders aching, my sciatic nerve acting up, or even how much my eyes needed a light bulb and a nap.
And if I could feel the start of a headache right above my eyebrows, then that was just part of the journey, a building block for the fucking future. No pain, no gain.
And if I didn’t get into my car again for another month, that would be great too. The idea of being behind the wheel for another minute made me want to puke. Maybe I’d buy another car while I was at it now that I thought about it. I had the blood money for it. Might as well use it for something I would actually need and use since my existing one didn’t have four-wheel drive.
Now. New. Present.
The past was staying where it was, because as much as I would’ve liked to light it
on fire and watch it burn, that couldn’t happen.
Mostly because I’d go to jail for double homicide, and that kind of thing was frowned upon.
Instead, I was moving on without a criminal record, and this was the next step. Bye, Nashville and everything there. See you later, Florida, too. Hello, Colorado and mountains and a peaceful, hopefully happy future. I was going to will that shit into existence. Like Yuki would also sing, if you put things out into the universe, hopefully someone will listen.
The hard part was over. This was my future. Another step in the next thirty-three years of my life.
I should thank the Joneses for it, really. Maybe not for taking advantage of me, but at least I knew now what I’d been in—who I’d been surrounded by. At least I had gotten out.
I was free.
Free to go back to where I’d spent the first part of my life, to see the place where I’d last seen my mom. The same place she had loved so much and that held so many good memories, as well as the worst.
I was going to do what I had to do to keep going with my life.
And the first step was to make a left down a dirt road that was technically called a county road.
Gripping the steering wheel as hard as I could as my tires drove over one pothole after another, I pictured the last blurry memory I had of my mom, the image of her greenish-brown eyes—the same ones I saw in the mirror. Her very medium brown hair, not dark but not light, was another thing we shared—at least until I’d started coloring my hair, but I’d stopped that. I’d only started coloring it because of Mrs. Jones. But mostly, I remembered how tightly my mom had hugged me before she had given me permission to go to my friend’s house the next day instead of going with her on the hike she had planned for both of us. How she had kissed me when she’d dropped me off and said, “See you tomorrow, Aurora-baby!”
Guilt, bitter and sharp, as fine and deadly as a dagger made out of an icicle, jabbed me in the stomach for just about the millionth time. And I wondered, like I always did when that familiar sensation came over me, What if? What if I’d gone with her? Like every other time I wondered, I told myself it didn’t matter because I would never know.
Then I squinted hard into the distance again as I drove over a bigger pothole, cursing the fact that none of these roads had streetlights.
In hindsight, I should have stretched this last part of the drive over another day so that I wouldn’t end up wandering through the mountains in the dark.
Because it wasn’t just the ups and the downs of elevation that came at you. There had been deer, chipmunks, rabbits, and squirrels. I’d seen an armadillo and a skunk. All of them decided at the last minute to run across the road and scare the living shit out of me so bad I slammed on my brakes and thanked God it wasn’t winter and there weren’t many cars out on the road. All I’d wanted to do was arrive to my temporary home.
To find a person named Tobias Rhodes who was renting out his garage apartment at a very reasonable rate. I’d be the first guest. The apartment didn’t have any reviews, but it fit every other thing I wanted from a rental, so I was willing to go for it.
Plus, it wasn’t like there had been anything else to choose from other than renting a room in someone’s house or staying in a hotel.
“Your destination is approaching on the left,” the navigation app spoke up.
I squeezed the steering wheel and squinted some more, just barely catching sight of the start of a driveway. If there were more houses around, I couldn’t tell in the darkness. This really was in the middle of nowhere.
Which was just what I wanted: peace and privacy.
Turning down the supposed driveway that was only marked by a reflective stake, I told myself that everything was going to be okay.
I would find a job… doing something… and I’d go through my mom’s journal and attempt to do some of the hikes that she’d written about. At least her favorites. It was one of the biggest reasons why coming here had seemed like such a good idea.
People cried over endings, but sometimes you had to cry over new beginnings. I wouldn’t forget what I’d left. But I was going to be excited—at least as much as I could be—about this start and however it would end.
One day at a time, right?
A house loomed up ahead. From the number of windows and lights on, it seemed smallish, but it wasn’t like that mattered. Off to the side, maybe twenty, maybe fifty feet away—this night driving bullshit was crap on my astigmatism—was another structure that looked an awful lot like a separate garage. There was a single car parked in front of the main house, an old Bronco I recognized because my cousin had spent years rebuilding one just like it.
I turned the car toward the smaller and less lit-up building, spotting the big garage door. Gravel crunched under my tires, rocks pinging and hitting the undercarriage, and I reminded myself again of why I was here and that everything would be okay. Then I parked around the side. I blinked and rubbed at my eyes, then finally pulled out my phone to reread the check-in instructions I had taken a screenshot of. Maybe tomorrow I’d go and introduce myself to the homeowner. Or maybe I’d just leave them alone if they left me alone.
I got out then.
This was the rest of my life.
And I was going to try my best, just like my mom had raised me to do, like she would have expected from me.
It only took about a minute with my camera’s flashlight to find the door—I’d parked right beside it—and the lockbox hanging from the knob. The code the owner sent me worked on the first try, and one single key sat inside the tiny box. It fit and the door squeaked open into a staircase on the left with another door perpendicular to it. I flipped on a light switch and opened the door directly in front of the one I’d just come through, expecting it to be the entrance into the garage and not being disappointed.
But what did surprise me was that there wasn’t a car inside.
There were various forms of padding along the walls, some of it the kind of foam I’d seen in every recording studio I’d ever been in, and other parts of it, blue floor mats that had been nailed in. There were even a couple of old mattresses pressed against the walls. In the center, there was a big, black, four-by-four speaker with a banged-up old amp, two stools, and a stand with three guitars on it. There was also a keyboard and a basic, starter drum set.
I swallowed.
Then I noticed two posters taped to the mats and released my breath slowly. One was for a young folk singer, and the other was for a big tour of two rock bands. Not country. Not pop.
And most importantly, no need to overthink it. I backed out the way I’d come in and shrugged off the practice space, closing the door behind me.
The stairs turned once, and I made it up, flipping on more lights and sighing with relief. It was just like the pictures had advertised: a studio apartment. There was a full-sized bed tucked against the wall on the right, a heater made to resemble a wood-burning stove in the corner, a small table with two chairs, a fridge that looked to be from the 90s but who cared, a stove that also had to be from the same decade, a kitchen sink, a set of doors that looked like they might be a closet, and a closed one that I hoped was the bathroom that had been in the listing. There was no washer or dryer, and I hadn’t bothered asking. There was a laundromat in town; I’d looked it up. I’d make it work.
Scarred wood floors covered the layout, and I smiled at the small mason jar sitting on the table with wildflowers in it.
The Joneses would have cried that this wasn’t the Ritz, but it was perfect. It had everything I needed, and it reminded me of the house I’d lived in with Mom with wood-paneled walls and just the… warmth of it.
It really was perfect.
For the first time, I let myself feel genuine excitement over my decision. And now that I did, it felt good. Hope sprang up inside of me like a Roman candle. It only took three trips to carry my bags, box, and cooler up.
You would figure that packing up your life would take days, even weeks. If you had
a lot of belongings, it might even take months.
But I didn’t have a lot of stuff. I’d left Kaden just about everything when his lawyer—a man I’d sent Christmas cards to for a decade—had sent me a thirty-day notice to move out of the house we’d shared, the day after he’d ended things. Instead, I’d left hours later. All I’d taken with me were two suitcases and four boxes worth of belongings.
Good. It was good it had happened, and I knew it. It had hurt then, hurt like a son of a bitch, and afterward. It didn’t anymore though.
But… I still sometimes wished I’d sent those traitors a pie made of shit just like in The Help. I wasn’t that good of a person.
I had just opened up the fridge so I could put the sandwich meat, cheese, mayo, three cans of strawberry soda, and single beer inside when I heard a creak from downstairs.
The door. It was the door.
I froze.
Then I grabbed my pepper spray from my purse and hesitated—because the owner wouldn’t just walk in, would they? I mean, it was their property, but I was renting it from them. I’d signed an agreement and sent a copy of my license over, hoping they wouldn’t do a search of my name, but oh well if they did. At a few of the rentals I’d stayed at, the owners had come over to see if I needed anything, but they hadn’t just strolled in. Only one of them had done a search and asked a lot of uncomfortable questions.
“Hello?” I called out, finger on the pepper spray trigger.
The only response I got was the sound of feet on the stairs, these loud clunks that sounded heavy.
All Rhodes Lead Here Page 1