Chapter One

Bobby

Two years earlier…

“I know we said we were going to make this place work and that it would one day be ours. I’m sorry, Daddy. I tried. I really did.” I blinked back the tears, hugged the photo of our first date a picnic at the park—and then placed it on top of the box before taping it closed.

As much as I didn’t want to move, I didn’t have a choice. It was eviction day tomorrow. I tried all I could to keep up the payments, but my job didn’t cut it, and even picking up gig work doing food delivery at night didn’t keep me afloat. After Daddy died, the first money that went was the insurance proceeds then my savings then I maxed oud three credit cards, and now it was just time to give up. I should’ve done it right after he passed. It had been foolish to think I could handle this place on my own.

The people we’d leased to own from had already submitted all the paperwork to the sheriff’s office and gone to court. It was an easy win for them. Daddy and I hadn’t been married when we made the arrangement, making the contract far more in their favor, even if I weren’t that far behind. Had we been renting, I’d have had some more time. But with this contract, time was up.

Basically, I was screwed.

If I were being pragmatic, it was probably going to be a lot easier living in my new studio apartment, at least financially. Even so, leaving this place was going to be rough. It was filled with all the what could have beens , like the room we were going to turn into my nursery, the patch we were going to clear in the back for a garden once it was fully ours, the bathroom we had planned on doubling in size by moving a wall and giving ourselves one of those showers that felt like water was coming at you from all angles and steam galore. The home had so much potential. And it still did, just not for us.

We had oh-so many dreams once upon a time—but how quickly they fell away with one single word: cancer. At least it was quick, and Daddy didn’t suffer long. It could have been much worse in that regard. For me, it was going to be horrible no matter how it progressed, but I felt solace in knowing he went from diagnosis to peace in only a few weeks. I’d seen people suffer for years on chemo, always living a half-life. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

But now, with this move, I was mourning all over again.

“Come on, Rooney.” I grabbed my stuffie off the mantel—he’d been supervising—and held him close to me as I fell into the beanbag chair and curled up into a ball. At one point, Rooney had looked like the raccoon he was, but he was so loved and so worn out now that people would be hard-pressed to know what he was meant to be. I didn’t care. He was mine.

He was there by my side before Daddy and I met. He was there by my side before we moved into this house. And he was going to be there when I moved into the studio apartment—the one I was grateful to get now that my credit was shot to shit. If the landlord hadn’t been friends with my boss at my main job, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t even have that. I’d be going straight to car living.

But really, this was good. Sad, but good.

Finally, I was going to be living within my means. I still had debts to pay, but with the house payment so far outside my range, it had never been feasible. Daddy’s job had paid so much better than mine that we hadn’t struggled at all. In fact, it had been on the lower end of our price range. You didn’t consider how different things would be if somebody died when you bought a house, especially when you were young. You didn’t think about how most of the insurance money would go toward a burial and funeral and then medical bills or calculate what you could afford on the lesser of the two incomes. You didn’t think about the C word.

How quickly life changed.

“It’s okay, Rooney.” I kissed the top of his head. “We’re going to do this, and it will be great.”

I stayed like that, curled in a ball, until a knock at the door let me know the movers were here. I had hired a local company, just two guys in their box truck, but that was okay. I didn’t really have much left here. I’d sold off all the nicer furniture, piece by piece, to pay bills. Now my couch was a beanbag chair. There were mostly just boxes to be moved.

They knocked again and I got up and let them in then watched as my entire life was taken out, box by box, beanbag by plastic tote, until everything was gone. Or so I thought.

“That’s all of it.” The boss of the two handed me a clipboard to sign.

Before I grabbed the pen, his coworker called from the other room. “Wait, I found some more!”

As we walked into the bedroom, my stomach dropped. Christmas. I’d forgotten about all of the Christmas things we had stashed.

Christmas had always been Daddy’s favorite time of year. We had so many decorations—from trees to realistic holly garlands to a nativity set the size of the entire mantel, filled with animals that really weren’t very nativity-related and a few elves, to candy cane lights.

If it made the place feel like Christmas, Daddy collected it. And the entire stash was kept in the closet behind my bed. We didn’t need to get in there often, so putting the bed there made sense. It allowed us to arrange the room as we wanted.

But it also meant I’d forgotten all about it. Or maybe it was less forgetting and more my brain protecting me and blocking it. Nothing made me miss Daddy more than Christmas, which was fast approaching.

My initial instinct was to tell them to leave it for the next people to deal with. But I couldn’t do it. They meant everything to Daddy, and throwing them away felt wrong. Instead, I thanked them for finding it and watched them pack it all into the truck.

I’d figure out where to store it later. It wasn’t going to fit into my apartment; that was for sure. But I couldn’t let it go—not yet, maybe not ever.

At the end of November, most people would be setting all their decorations up. But that wouldn’t be me. Not this year. Maybe not any year.

I would not be celebrating Christmas. It was too hard alone, and it wasn’t like I could go to bunches of parties to stave off the loneliness. I didn’t have extra money to even bring a dish to pass or a Secret Santa gift, much less get a new suit.

But that was okay. I was going to just stay home with Rooney, throw on some of my little clothes, and watch a marathon of my favorite TV show while eating enough chicken nuggies and boxed mac and cheese to feed a family of nine. Was it the healthiest way to handle the holidays? No, but I was still in survival mode. Healthy could wait until later.

Maybe next year I’d be more in the mood—or the one after that. But right now? Yeah, it wasn’t going to happen. I was too numb.

Which was better than last year, when I spent the entire time crying. How sad is it when numb is a step up? A step in the right direction. A step toward healing.