The Change Up Read Free

Babe didn’t care. But still … the heavy rumble clawed at his common sense and had him rethinking his usual walk in the woods. He didn’t want any trouble.
    He was just about to turn around and head back to the house when he heard faint voices. Now that was curious. Splitting a box shrub in two, Sam peered deeper into the forest that separated his property from the far edges of the old community college, but he couldn’t see a dang thing other than more bark and leaves. What was going on in there?
    Right about now, everyone in bucolic Arlington, Pennsylvania, was split between three places: the Catholic Church, the Presbyterian Church, or the Pancake Palace. Well, almost everyone. He was here, like he was every Sunday since he’d walked away from a budding baseball career and bought his mother’s favorite log house on the end of her favorite wooded cul-de-sac.
    He glanced at the shockingly blue sky like he did every time he thought of his mother and damn near jumped a foot back from the forest’s edge when a god-awful clanging sent the birds fleeing the treetops.
    Finally, Babe abandoned her bone and bolted past him into the thick of things.
Dumb dog,
he thought affectionately. Every other animal was running in the opposite direction.
    Sam hesitated for only a second and then followed her. “Babe!” He whistled. Her barking was sure to scare away whatever was left of the birds. He looked overhead like he expected the mass exodus to continue. But there wasn’t a hint of movement anywhere. Just an eerie stillness punctuated by Babe’s incessant barking. And with every step, his desire to turn around and avoid whatever was going on grew.
    “Babe!” He whistled again and cut around the rock-rimmed fire pit he and his father would put to good use later tonight. There was nothing like two guys nursing a six-pack and chilling under the stars. Buying this house had been the best thing Sam had done with the money he’d made from playing baseball. But those thoughts never came without the wish that he’d done so sooner—soon enough for his mother to have sat around that fire, too.
    He rushed an apologetic glance skyward before he hurdled over the thick trunk of a fallen tree on his sprint toward an agitated Babe. It sounded like she had something cornered. Normally, he would’ve guessed a squirrel or a possum, because it was a little too early in the year for it to be a fawn, but he remembered those voices. Babe normally wasn’t weird with people.
    He cleared another patch of trees, and sure enough, Babe had something cornered: two people and a bright-red pickup truck towing a dozer on a trailer.
    “Hey!” he yelled to his dog, and this time, he clapped. “Get over here!”
    Babe looked at him, looked back at the pair who Sam was sizing up, and trotted remorsefully back to his side, where she sat.
    One of the people beside the truck was a woman. And not just any woman. “Rachel Reed,” he said, darn-near accusatory, recognizing her immediately despite the five or so years that had passed since the last time he’d seen her. She wore tailored, tan dress pants and a tight, white sweater, looking like a Wall Street pinup. “You’re a little overdressed for a hike and awfully far from Philly, aren’t you?”
    A blinding smile jumped off her sun-kissed face, making her noted resemblance to Cameron Diaz even more undeniable. “Little Sammy Sutter! What are you doing here?”
    “I live here,” he said, gesturing in the direction of his house beyond the trees and deciding to let the “little Sammy” quip slide while they were in the presence of a stranger. “Sam Sutter,” he said instead, emphasizing the adult version of his name and reaching a hand toward the broad man standing beside Rachel. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”
    “Wes Allen.”
    “Wes is from Pittsburgh,” Rachel said. “He’s helping me out with a little project.”
    In the woods. On a Sunday. Sam glanced at the dozer, and the hairs on