LITMIR.BIZ

       1

      FOR AID WORKERS, home can mean a lot of things. A two-bedroom ranch with a picket fence. A fourth-story walk-up in the city. A mud hut under a banana tree. A country listed on a passport. It can be big or small or anything in between.

      One thing all these homes share, though, is that aid workers miss them. They long to go there. They are homesick.

      Not me. I’ve spent the past sixteen years running from my home, and what happened there. Could have lived the rest of my life never returning to the place where I will always be known as the murderer’s daughter.

      And yet here I sit in my old driveway, in a rental parked behind a shiny new Buick. More than thirty-six hours into this new disaster—my disaster—and I’ve accomplished exactly nothing more than a crusty coffee stain down the front of my jeans and a mean case of jet lag.

      Embrace the chaos, Gia. Over the course of the past seven thousand miles, it has become my mantra.

      Uncle Cal climbs out of his car, and he’s wearing his usual outfit: gleaming reptile skin stretched across pointy cowboy boots, Brooks Brothers suit of smoky pin-striped wool, black leather jacket worn soft and supple. Here in the hills of Appalachia, it’s a look perfectly suitable for church, a fancy restaurant or a courtroom. As one of the highest paid criminal lawyers in Tennessee, Cal’s worn it in all three.

      I follow his lead and step out of the rental. It’s mid-February and Rogersville—a tiny blip on the Eastern Tennessee map—is in the death throes of winter. My ancient fleece is not equipped to handle the Appalachian Mountain cold, and I long for my winter coat, still in mothballs in a London suburb. Cal opens his arms and I step into their warmth, inhaling his familiar scent, a combination of leather, designer aftershave and Juicy Fruit gum.

      “Welcome home, baby girl,” he says into my hair.

      Home.

      I twist my neck to face the house I’ve not seen for sixteen years, and a shudder of something unpleasant hits me between the shoulder blades. Once a place that instilled in me a sense of refuge and comfort, this house now provokes the exact opposite. Grief. Fear. Dread. This house isn’t home. Home shouldn’t give you the creeps.

      Cal’s hands freeze on my protruding scapula and he steps back, his gaze traveling down my frame. Thanks to a particularly nasty bout of food poisoning last month, it’s a good ten pounds lighter than the last time he hugged me, back when I was already high-school skinny. “I thought you were putting an end to the famine, not succumbing to it.”

      “If you’re ever on the Horn of Africa, you should probably stay away from the street stalls in Dadaab. Just because they claim their meat is fresh doesn’t mean it’s true. Or for that matter, that it’s even meat.”

      “Good tip.” He pulls the toothpick from his molars and gives me his trademark squint, but there’s a smile in his tone. “I’ll try to remember that.”

      A lucky break Cal had called it when he finally tracked me down in Kenya. There was more, something about a perjury scandal and a diagnosis that required full-time, in-home hospice care, but by then I wasn’t really listening. I was too busy wondering on what planet capping off sixteen years of high-security confinement by coming home to die would be considered lucky.

      I swallow a sudden lump. “Is he in a lot of pain?”

      Cal doesn’t have to ask who I mean, and at the reminder of the cancer squeezing his only brother’s pancreas, grief muddies his brow. “Not yet. But he will be very soon.”

      The lump returns and puts down roots.

      “For an innocent man to end his prison term like this...” He sighs, and his breath makes puffy wisps in the February air. “I’ve got lots of choice words to say about it, none of them fit for your ears.”

      From the moment Cal arrived on the scene—before my father was a suspect, before he signed on as my father’s attorney, even before Ella Mae’s body had been photographed and bagged and carried away—his belief in my father’s innocence has been unwavering.

      For me, the situation was never that clear. If I thought my father was capable of murder, that he premeditated and carried out a plan to suffocate Ella Mae Andrews, his wife and my stepmother, I’m not certain I could forgive either him or his behavior. In fact, I’m not certain I would even be here, that I would have traveled all this way for a last goodbye.

      But I came all this way because I’m not certain. In my father’s case, the evidence is unclear, the testimony conflicted. The shadows of my doubt run in both directions.

      I stuff my icy hands into my front jeans pockets and shiver, not merely from the cold.

      Cal takes the gesture as his cue and reaches into his pocket, where a set of keys jingles. “Ready to get inside before you freeze to death?”

      No. My heart races, and every tiny hair soldiers to attention on the back of my neck, commanding me to run. Never again. No.

      “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

      I follow Cal up the five steps to the wraparound porch, summoning the detached efficiency that’s made me one of Earth Aid International’s top disaster relief experts. I can’t manage even an ounce of objectivity. This disaster is too close, its aftermath still too painful. I can’t detach

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