I shut the door and looked around Blackpine.
The town hadn’t changed much. Same false-front buildings with peeling paint. Same grain elevator at the edge of town. Same bar with neon beer signs flickering in the front window. Same diner with two pickup trucks parked crooked out front. Same mountain line in the distance, dark with pine and fir and the last scraps of summer haze hanging over it like smoke.
The place smelled like wet earth, diesel, and sawdust. It smelled like every version of my childhood at once.
I should have felt relief.
Instead, I felt sixteen again.
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