What Brings You Back Home

a serialized story

“What brings you back home?” people want to know.

“Work,” Rebecca replies.

The assumption is that she has returned for a certain kind of work, as innocuous as it is forgettable. She’s in marketing, right? Or is it advertising? One or the other. For some big tech company in California. Married to a guy from San Francisco. She doesn’t come home much, hasn’t since she met the guy. That was probably fifteen, sixteen years ago. She loves it out there, despite the fires and the earthquakes.

Only after she is gone, after the puzzle pieces have fit together, will someone say, “Who knew?”

Well, she knew. She’s not one to make it up as she goes along.

A note on this story: This is part one of a serialized story that originally appeared in Alabama Noir, edited by Don Noble and published by Akashic Books. For years, I have had the idea of further developing this story, perhaps into a novel. I keep setting it aside and returning to it. Hopefully, sharing the story here will help me to grow it past its current ending. I’ll be posting it one segment at a time here on Novella and will see where it takes me.

Read Part 2.

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