She stopped dead in her tracks. "What's wrong?" Abe asked as he turned back towards her. They were both a little out of breath from their tramp.

She tried to make her voice sound casual as she made her reply. "This is your house?" The cozy bungalow looked strikingly familiar to her. She knew she'd seen it before. But that couldn't be possible--she'd never been to the English countryside in all her life before this. And yet even the crossed slats on the dark wood siding stared back at her just as she expected, a taunting sort of déjà vu.

Abe, too, stared back at her, suspicion in his furrowed brow, and Ava was painfully aware how poorly she was hiding her alarm. "It's my father's," he finally answered. "But I live there with him. What about it?"

She searched for a response. "It's just...really nice!" she finished lamely. Thankfully, this had a better effect than she expected.

Abe glowed with pride. "Worked on a lot of it myself," he said, and his chest swelled. "With my father, of course!" Satisfied at this explanation of her apparent shock, he continued down the grass toward the door with an extra skip to his gait. Ava, for her part, breathed a sigh of relief as she followed after him.

This wouldn't take long, she assured herself. Especially if the old man was as easy to maneuver as his cheerful son.