Excerpt #1 from Reasons, by Tracy Fabre, ©2009

Three weeks later, the train was pulling into Statler, Colorado, a community of about fifteen thousand situated between Denver and Colorado Springs. It was an old town, its residents comprised of descendants of the original settlers, new residents seeking an escape from city life, and those who just never got around to seeing if there was anything better out there than the glorious blue sky, the rolling green hills, and the snow-topped mountains on the horizon.

I was having fourteenth thoughts. I had decided to come because I wanted to see Annie and Robert, and the ranch, and if my memories of happiness here would measure up in the light of another decade. I had no plans to tell anyone what I’d learned from my parents, but I did plan to make as much of a study of Bobby and Tam as I could.

But the closer the train got during the two-day journey, the more I found myself wondering if this had been, in fact, a dumb-ass decision. At every stop I considered getting off and hitching a ride on the next train back east, and at every stop I told myself I was being a doofus and might as well go forward.

I wished more than once that my parents hadn’t told me about the accident. It was more than likely I’d have gotten through the entire summer without anyone sitting down with me to say, “So, let me tell you every detail of this terrible thing that happened nine years ago, and by the way, I notice you have this jagged scar running from your calf all the way up your thigh; how exactly did that happen?”

Leaning my head against the cool glass of the window, I concluded I was an idiot, but more to the point, I was an idiot about three minutes away from beginning my summer with at least one person who knew he’d once struck someone and driven away in the night.

Read excerpt #2