Chapter 5: Ashbourne

Jessa left the apartment before dawn with one bag and no plan to come back.

The lab had walked through her front door.

She would not sleep in that bed again, and she would not bring her brothers to it either.

She sat in the car with her notebook on her knee and crossed out every address on the page except one.

A stretch of hills north of Kingsport, near the Ashgrove military academy, where the roads were bad and the land was empty.

In the first life that country had held out longer than any city on the coast.

The dead had never come through it in numbers, because there was nothing to bring them.

She called a rural broker named in the listings and asked for a viewing at nine.

The drive took an hour, and the city thinned into farmland, then trees, then two-lane road.

The broker was waiting at the first gate, a heavy man with an honest face and a folder under his arm.

He showed her two farmhouses first.

The first was too close to the highway, with a driveway like a straight flat shot.

The second had a neighbor's easement cutting through the middle of the land.

"Not these," she said, already walking back to the car.

"I want one road in, hills on every side, and a house I can hold."

The broker looked at her for a moment.

"I may have exactly one, and I've never been able to sell it."

The last road wound uphill for a mile through thick trees, past a stone wall that ran off into the woods.

Then the land opened into a wide, shallow valley, and she stopped breathing.

Hills rose on three sides, steep enough to make any road but the one behind them a hard climb.

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