Prologue: Home is Where the Heart Is
Cassidy's POV
I had always wanted to teach, it was just one of those callings that comes up and grabs a person. It grabbed ahold of me when I was twelve and wouldn't let go. The plan from then on had always been to go to Washington State and then to get the hell across country and as far from Forks, Washington as I could. I never wanted to be trapped in the small town I grew up in. I never wanted to stay there forever; I wanted something big and shiny. Some east coast city where no one knew my name sounded like the right thing for me. It had been my goal and I'd achieved it for almost two years, teaching in a small private school in Georgia. I was happy there. I was beginning to have a life there. I couldn't think of one thing that would have made me move back to Forks after my escape. Visits were a given, I had my family back there, family that I loved more then anyone could possibly understand. Teaching in my small private school was my life and I was happy, that was all that had mattered to my parents.
And then the unthinkable happened, something no child ever thinks about happening; even if their parents were in their nineties. It was late at night and the phone had rang, what felt like, a millions times before I ever found it. It was my father, in a panic. My father never panicked about anything, not even when my baby brother had been rushed to the hospital when he was four because he'd passed out on the park. I don't want to, but I can remember every word from his mouth that night. It's almost like a nightmare being replayed over and over.
"Cas, you need to come home, as soon as you can." His voice was high pitched and desperate. In my half awake state, I could even hear the pain under it.
"What are you talking about, daddy?" My own voice was mugged down with sleep as I looked over at the clock and saw that it was one in the morning. I had to be up four and half hours, I would never get back to sleep now.
"You have to come home baby…it's…it's your mother. Something's happened." That served to wake me up from my stupor. I rushed to sit up and stared into the darkness around me while my father explained that there had been an accident on one of those stupid slick roads and she'd ran off into a ditch.
One simple nights and my whole world changed. It brought me back home to say good bye to a lifeless body. Once home, I couldn't bring myself to leave my father and brother. I tried, I packed everything I had brought with me to go back to Georgia, but in the end it hadn't happened. Two months later, I walked myself into the office of Forks High School to try and see if there was any way I could get hired. In a small town, if you get a job at the school normally, you keep it for a while. I got lucky I guess, Mr. Howards just couldn't say no and it helped that Mrs. Peabody, the same exact woman that had once yelled at me about run on sentences, was retiring. When the new school year started, I would be teaching sophomore, junior, and senior Advance English in the school that I had once dreamed of never seeing again.
I still can't bring myself to regret my decision. It was probably one of the hardest things I ever had to do, but my family needed me and I knew there wasn't any way I could have gone thousands of miles away again and been happy. I guess the saying is true, home is where the heart is.