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Chapter 1
Chapter 1: The Goodbye
The worst part wasn't the suitcase.
It wasn't the way his mom triple-checked her gear bag on the kitchen table, or the stack of stamped envelopes she'd pre-addressed so Hugo could write to her. It wasn't even the drive to Grandma Bev's house, which took four hours and smelled like gas station coffee and the pine-tree air freshener swinging from the rearview mirror.
The worst part was the hug.
Because when Captain Laura Campbell hugged her son, she squeezed so tight that Hugo could feel her heartbeat through her uniform jacket. And heartbeats were honest. They didn't say "I'll be back before you know it" or "Six months is nothing." They just hammered fast and hard, the way hearts do when someone is scared.
"You're going to be fine," his mom said into the top of his head. She smelled like the lavender soap she always used. "Grandma Bev's house is awesome. You'll have your own room. There's a creek out back."
"I know," Hugo said. His voice came out thick.
"And you'll start at Farnham Elementary on Monday. Fresh start."
Hugo didn't want a fresh start. He wanted his old start, the one where he lived in their apartment near Fort Hood and walked to school with his friend DeShawn and came home to find his mom making terrible pasta.
But his mom was a medic, and medics went where they were needed.
Grandma Bev appeared on the porch. She was a tall woman with silver hair cut short and reading glasses permanently perched on top of her head, even though Hugo had never once seen her push them down to actually read anything. She wore paint-stained jeans and a flannel shirt, and she waved like she was directing a plane on a runway.
"There's my boy!" she called.
Hugo's mom crouched down. Hugo was eleven, and technically too old for crouching-down conversations, but he didn't say so.
"I need you to do something for me," she said.
"What?"
"Be brave. Not the fake kind where you pretend everything's fine. The real kind, where you feel scared and do stuff anyway."
Hugo nodded. His throat was too tight to talk.
His mom kissed his forehead, grabbed her bags, and walked back to the car. She didn't look back, and Hugo knew that was on purpose. Looking back would make it worse.
The car pulled away. The taillights blinked at the end of the long gravel driveway, and then she was gone.
Grandma Bev put her hand on Hugo's shoulder.
"Come on, sweetheart. I made brownies, and they're only a little burned."
Hugo followed her inside, dragging his duffel bag behind him. The house was exactly the way he remembered from holiday visits: enormous and creaky, with mismatched furniture and bookshelves in every room and a grandfather clock in the hallway that bonged so loud it could wake the dead.
His room was upstairs, at the end of a hall lined with framed photographs. Hugo tried not to look at them. Half were pictures of his mom growing up, and looking at kid-Laura made his chest hurt.
The room itself was fine. A bed with a blue quilt. A desk by the window. A rug shaped like a bear that Hugo remembered being terrified of when he was five.
"Bathroom's across the hall," Grandma Bev said. "Towels are in the cabinet. Wi-Fi password is on the fridge. And Hugo?"
"Yeah?"
"You can be sad. That's allowed."
She closed the door gently behind her.
Hugo sat on the bed and stared at the bear rug. After a while, he pulled out his phone and typed a text to his mom. The letters scrambled in his head the way they always did, and he had to delete and retype three times before autocorrect figured out what he meant.
*Miss you already.*
The reply came fast, like she'd been waiting.
*Miss you more. Impossible to out-miss me. It's science.*
Hugo almost smiled. Almost.
