Forever Home

Hi, and thank you for being here. It means a lot to me that you're taking the time to read my story.

Forever Home is one of my favorites, and I hope you fall for Madi the way I did, though fair warning, she's going to make you work for it a little. She comes in swinging and doesn't apologize for it. Stick with her anyway.

She's worth it. I promise.

If you want to explore more of my books and the world we're building around these stories, everything lives over at kiralorneromance.com. No obligation, just more stories waiting if you want them.

Kira



The sunsets out here were always beautiful. It was the memories out here that weren’t as pretty.

Madi Cormier—stage name Madison Cordell—knew this road. She’d traveled it for the first time at nineteen with Phillip, who had talked her into going with him to California for an advertising job. She didn’t know shit then. Phillip wasn’t in advertising at all; he was a dealer, a mean one, with no qualms about trading Madi to get himself out of trouble.

Phillip was gone within a month. Madi—hooked on just about everything—found herself dancing, if you could call it dancing, for middle-aged men at Cougars. Really, she just wiggled, showed a lot of skin, and made money on the side by charging customers for extra time. By twenty-two, Madi knew every sex position anatomically and physically possible. She also drank, drugged, and had a police sheet two pages long.

She had mostly avoided jail, but that brings us to the point in the story that mattered.

Her last pusher—boyfriend slash part-time sales rep—was found dead. Madi wanted nothing to do with the mess. She didn’t miss him, wasn’t even remotely unhappy he was dead, but she saw the writing on the overscribbled whiteboard. She wasn’t making any positive moves in California. Her life was going to end there, and she would check out without ever making a difference.

Which brings us to now.

US-550, somewhere between Bernalillo and the turnoff for San Vespra—about eighty miles north of Albuquerque. Madi had a sunset. She did not have a plan, or gas money, or any idea how to retire from California for good.

She just had this road. And the feeling that she had one last chance left in her.

Madi reached for the Coke she’d picked up about sixty miles back. The cup was a bucket. And yes, to Madi it genuinely was—she was 4′9". Very small. People didn’t realize how big a gas-station Coke cup is to someone two-thirds the size of nearly everyone else.

She wore a size-five shoe. Bought her underwear in the teenage girls’ section. She was twenty-three, tired, tiny, tenacious, and temperamental.

Really, the equivalent of a feral badger—a hurricane backed into a tiny box.

Madi sighed. Her legs were tired. She already had the pillow squished up behind her back—about as plump as it would allow—but her feet still barely reached the gas pedal. The bench seats in her old 1970 Chevy Caprice weren’t made for pocket rockets like Madi.

She turned up the radio. The only station she could get was a bouncy Spanish channel. She knew only a few words; currently, José was missing María somewhere near San…something, and margaritas were involved.

She didn’t have her phone. It had disappeared—most likely hocked by her roommate two days ago. All she had were some clothes in the back seat, a few pictures, and two ratty fair plush animals: one a bear, and one… maybe a giraffe. Or a tiger. She called it Mr. Messy.

She kept them mostly as symbols of her life: a trashed, cheap bear and Mr. Messy. Also, because she only owned a few boxes of stuff, why not? There was plenty of room in the car.

She sipped her Coke again. Jesus. Could people actually drink a bucket of Coke? Madi forgot—often, especially when taking on fights—that she was only 4′9" and weighed eighty-five pounds.

Her size had always been this strange, double-edged thing—valuable in ways she never asked for, infuriating in every way that mattered. Men adored it, worshipped it, treated it like a prize. Meanwhile, she could barely reach the gas pedal or a top shelf without performing acrobatics. That contradiction lived under her skin, buzzing like a hornet.

But the real frustration was the part she never said out loud. The dozen unresolved knots she carried around—anger, fear, pride, need—none of which she would ever admit to needing help with. So she built herself a code instead. Never back down. Take what you can. Never break. She repeated it like a prayer, or a dare, or a promise she made to the girl she used to be.

She didn’t have height on her side. She didn’t have muscle, privilege, or safety. But she had cunning—sharp, instinctive, almost animal—and that wild reservoir of energy that made other girls seem slow by comparison.

Madi didn’t wait for anything to save her. She didn’t even believe in saving.

She made life work through sheer will, through refusing to be small in the ways that mattered, even if the world insisted on seeing her that way.

Underneath it all, the truth was simple:

She’d been underestimated her entire life.

Which was precisely why she never let anyone see her flinch.

She spotted the first sign she’d seen in forty miles—San Vespra, left turn, 24 miles—and it felt like the desert had finally decided to give her one thing that wasn’t a joke. Even the welcome lizard perched on the only rock in sight looked like it had been waiting specifically for her. It did one lazy push-up in the heat, a tiny flick of approval.

“Great to see you too, buddy,” she muttered, lips quirking. “Keep up the good work.”

She eased the Caprice into the turn. The brakes screamed their opinion, a long metal whine that made her wince. Madi was pretty sure the car wouldn’t make it back to California—even if she had wanted to, which she absolutely didn’t.

She just hoped she wouldn’t have to try.

By the time she rolled into San Vespra—at least the part that passed for downtown—it was evening. Not quite night, just that washed-out, in-between light that made everything look tired. Madi felt the same. Coke half-finished, bladder screaming, ass numb, legs cramped from spending the whole damn day stretched like a rubber band, trying to reach pedals designed for normal-sized humans.

She knew these roads.

She’d grown up here—or close enough. Ten miles west, in a town that didn’t exist anymore except in the bones of people who remembered it. San Vespra was the nearest thing to home she had left. She’d run at eighteen, thinking anywhere would be better.

She still believed that.

Mostly.

She made the lazy right turn onto his street. Him.

Calten—Cal—Morris.

He knew she was coming. She’d texted him weeks back, when she’d still had her fucking phone and enough nerve to pretend she wasn’t running on fumes and fear. He’d asked if she was sure she wanted to try “this” again. “This” could’ve meant anything with them—sex, romance, a fight, a disaster, a second chance.

All Madi knew was that she needed to get out of California before it killed her, and she needed a place to recover that wouldn’t immediately spit her back out.

And Cal—

Cal was both the place and the person she trusted to do that with.

The street—if you even wanted to call it that—wasn’t short. Nothing in San Vespra was. But she knew this road even in the dark. Cal’s place sat a mile up, and chances were he’d already seen her, one sad headlight dragging itself toward his driveway.

Madi adjusted the rearview mirror, tilting it all the way down until it caught her eyes. She looked tired. She looked small. She looked like she’d fought a highway with nothing but caffeine and attitude.

She fluffed her hair anyway.

Pulled out the scrunchie.

Let the red fall over her shoulder in that wild, messy way she knew played in her favor.

“Cute,” she murmured to herself.

Cal wouldn’t care what she was wearing—true—but he always reacted to the version of her that leaned into being tiny, flirty, skin-forward. He’d always been a pushover for her when she wanted him to be. And tonight? She needed him to be. She needed a roof. A bed. A stretch of time where she wasn’t running from something.

She eased past the… church? Temple? Cult? Whatever it was that bordered Cal’s property. Round huts—buildings—something—had sprung up a few years back, like mushrooms after a storm. The Church of the MoonBeam and Sunlight, or something equally whimsical and suspicious. They’d put up a new sign since she’d last been here—bright, psychedelic seventies font—and even paved a parking lot.

“Progress,” she muttered.

She noticed lights glowing in the windows. Of course.

Culty cults gotta cult.

“Do your thing, moon people,” she said under her breath, not slowing.

She reached for her lipstick without even thinking about it.

Cal would want her the second she arrived—he always had.

And she needed that to work in her favor tonight.

She pulled into the driveway, gravel crunching under the Caprice’s one remaining headlight. Cal’s pickup sat where it always did, like it had never moved a day in its life. The lights were on in the house.

Good.

She needed on.