Storytime again! This time we’re getting a tidbit from Chapter 2 of Angel’s Gate. Angel’s Gate is the first book in my ShadowGate Series. Available now for purchase. Today I wanted to give you a little preview, the beginning of Chapter 2. We are introduced to our MC, AG’s, childhood home. Read on for a teaser of Angel’s Gate or click the video above to have me read to you!
Chapter 2 – Angel’s Gate:
It still looked the same.
With the gray of dawn spreading through the streets, it looked to AG as if no time had passed since she had left Shelter Cove. As if the last decade had simply been erased. The mountains cupped it on three sides, their shoulders heavy with the deep green of pine and hemlock. The slinking mists of early dawn rolled in off the lake, disguising the signs of progress, the scars left by time. It was easy not to notice the scattering of new houses set back in the trees or the new marina, swallowed by the morning fog as it stretched out into the still, dark waters. There were other signs time hadn’t stood still, yet not enough to remove the strange and sinking sensation that she had never really escaped.
She was not the same kid who had left, in that decade she had found her freedom, her strength and one quick trip back couldn’t strip all of it away. Could it? She wasn’t a child anymore and this wasn’t her world. Still the feeling of being sucked back in time remained with her, darkening her heart and thoughts.
The SUV wove its way through the familiar roads and she found herself remembering her childhood at every turn. There was the corner she had crashed her new ten speed on Christmas twenty years before. There was the high school where she had kissed her first boy and done a lot more than that a night or two in senior year. Those were memories she looked back fondly on. She had loved Luke Olson as only a teenage girl could and he had been a sweet boy.
Somewhere she had heard he was married, the father of two. Still a sweet boy.
There was the Midtown Market, where she had worked her first job the summer she turned sixteen…
Shelter Cove was filled with memories, both good and bad, but it would never again be her home. She could not see herself growing old in that place. She couldn’t see herself ever giving up her career and life in San Francisco to live in that postage stamp town. Couldn’t imagine herself marrying and raising a passel of kids, with two cars in the drive and a dog in the yard. She couldn’t imagine that as her life, even though a small voice whispered it would have been easy to if she tried. She didn’t want to try. That domestic vision was what her mother had wanted and had never achieved. She wasn’t going to want the same thing and spend her life regretting when it never happened. She was smarter than that. She would make the life she wanted and her life was in California, three thousand miles away.
When they turned onto the street leading to her childhood home the pain inside of AG seemed to shift, expand. Unconsciously she raised a hand to press it against her heart. Home…
The house still stood as it always had, two stories, rich brown siding with a wide porch and peaked ceiling. Two large windows looked out onto the carefully kept lawn, one from the living room, the other from the breakfast nook. In the dim morning light the house looked tired, sad. Or that was how AG felt inside as she looked at it, knowing it was empty.
Until next time,
L
The ShadowGate: Enter and be saved…
