Chapter 37

37

FIA

T he corner of the living room closest to the windows overlooking the street felt safe and cozy under the glare of Christmas lights. I could hear Dad snoring upstairs, and Mom’s faint voice echoed from their bedroom as she wrapped last-minute presents and talked on the phone to someone, probably one of her sisters.

I turned my mug of eggnog in a circle between my hands, sipping slowly. Dad liked it with spiced rum but I’d never been a rum drinker. I wrinkled my nose and set it down on the coffee table for probably the fifth time and went back to watching the snow pile on the sidewalk. A door creaked open upstairs, followed by cautious footsteps as someone walked down the stairs.

I kept my eyes on the window as Colin’s shadow fell over the living room. He cleared his throat, but I shook my head. “There’s nothing you can possibly say to me right now?—”

“I was an asshole,” Colin rasped.

I looked up at him. He was wearing an old sweatshirt and jeans, a look I hadn’t seen him sport in years. Maybe I was softened by the memory of my brother from the past instead of the corporate dickhead in a suit I often imagined him as, but I held his gaze.

“I was drunk.”

“Go on.”

“Do you want me to grovel at your feet, Fia?”

“You just embarrassed me in front of the entire family and drove Mason away!”

Colin’s face fell. He ran his hands through his hair as he sat down on the opposite side of the couch, uninvited into my personal space. “He’s my friend. The idea of you and him…”

“It’s none of your business.”

“In my eyes, you’re still ten,” he snapped. “I just can’t—Had I known?—”

“That I was going to fall in love with him?” My voice broke over the words.

Something broke in Colin too. He rubbed his temple like he had a vicious headache, which he fully deserved. “Are you really?”

“I am.” The words fell out of me as naturally as the air I breathed. Maybe it hadn’t hit me before, but the truth was hitting me now, directly in the chest. “I’m in love with Mason, and whatever you said to him tonight absolutely ruined it.”

“I didn’t know.”

“It doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t have mattered because this wasn’t your business, Colin. It’s mine. Do you see me raging because Mason mentioned something about you and Liv? My best friend?!” In reality, I’d been wondering what the hell I’d missed when it came to that, but the idea of Liv and Colin together felt as foreign as Colin thinking he had the right to stick his nose in my business.

“I wanted you to go follow your dreams in California. I didn’t want Mason getting in the way like Jake did.”

“I wasn’t going to take the job.”

He chuckled like he didn’t believe me, then tapered off, noticing the cold, serious look on my face. “Why not?”

I pulled my knees against my chest. “A few weeks ago, I would have been jumping up and down, packing my things, kissing everyone goodbye but I don’t want to go to California. I want to stay here, in the city. I want to start my own business, and I have a small portfolio now. I could start taking on clients, just small things, work my way up to larger events eventually, if I wanted to. I just don’t want what I used to want.”

“Because of Mason.”

“Because of me .” I toyed with the fringe on the edge of the blanket covering my legs. Colin’s eyes were calm and glassy. I rolled my lip between my teeth, shrugging. “I missed being a photographer when I was doing these events with Mason. I kept thinking, wow, this would make a great portrait. A landscape. Those people and their outfits. The love I saw. I wasn’t thinking about putting on the events. I was thinking about capturing them with my camera, and Mason just understood that. One of the parties we went to—” Tears stung my eyes as I smiled around the memory. “We had to bring ornaments to hang on trees all around a massive ballroom. He brought an ornament shaped like a little camera for me to hang and I think I realized I loved him at that moment.”

“Fia, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“It doesn’t matter now, does it? It’s ruined.”

“No, I can fix it.”

“He walked away from me. He just left.”

“It was my fault. I said something to him that I shouldn’t have.” He stood and chewed his lower lip in thought before absently nodding to himself and walking toward the kitchen, grabbing his jacket off the back of one of the chairs in the dining room.

“Where are you going?”

“Searching for some Christmas magic. Don’t wait up for me.” He left without another word, but his car remained in the driveway, covered in snow. I watched as he walked down the street under the glow of the streetlights until he was out of sight.

“Fia, what are you still doing up? It’s almost midnight?” Mom hiked down the stairs in her favorite Christmas pajamas, a flannel set with stars and ornaments all over them in looping, swirling patterns. Her hair was in curlers and she had eye patches stuck under her eyes as she squinted into the soft lamplight in the living room. “Santa won’t come if you stay up.”

“I’m twenty-five,” I said, trying to work my voice into something less forlorn, but failed. “I stopped believing in Santa ten years ago.”

“Yeah, I remember. You were, in fact, fifteen.” She sat on the couch beside me. “Between you and me, I still believe in him.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I do. How else can you explain that feeling in the air around Christmas? The magic?”

“It doesn’t feel so magical right now,” I said.

Her lips thinned. With a soft groan, she rose and padded over to the Christmas tree. “I have something for you.”

“I can wait until tomorrow morning,” I said. “It’s fine.”

“No, I want you to open it now.” She sat back down and handed me a surprisingly heavy present in the shape of a shoe box.

I cautiously unwrapped the gift and stared down in shock. “Mom?” There was no way they could afford this. I opened the lid and lifted out a Nikon Z9, the camera I’d been lusting over for the past two years.

“It’s the one you wanted, right?” she asked.

“You can’t—Mom?—”

“I know it’s expensive, honey. We wanted to buy it for you. Look, there’s some extra lenses, too. For whatever you need.”

“You shouldn’t have.” I found myself about to burst into tears.

“Colin helped.”

Now I was feeling worse. “I don’t know if I can forgive him for what he did.”

“I understand.” She nodded, her lips a thin line. “I’m upset too.”

“I’m not taking that job.”

“It’s okay?—”

“But I don’t even care about that. I just—I just want Mason and now he’s gone, and I don’t know what to do.”

“Sleep on it, Fia. See how you feel in the morning. But first, take my picture.” She grinned, giving me a silly pose in her curlers and eye patches.

I giggled through tears, and then there it was. The Christmas magic I’d lost a few hours ago.

I woke to snowy gray sunlight drifting through the blinds in my childhood bedroom. I stretched in the sheets, sighing heavily as I opened my puffy eyes and blinked. My back cracked from sleeping on an even worse mattress than the one stuffed in my loft, but as I peeked through the blinds, I saw nothing but snow. It was a true winter wonderland out there. All of the cars and buildings were covered in it.

I loved a white Christmas.

The reality of the day before didn’t hit me until I walked into the bathroom and saw my expression in the mirror. My cheeks were red and raw and my eyes were puffy with dark circles beneath them. I rubbed at them, tasting salty tears on my lips, and tried my best not to break down. I’d left my phone charging in the kitchen last night, so I padded downstairs, met by the scent of coffee spiked with eggnog thick in the air.

Dad was in the kitchen flipping pancakes as his ancient radio on the counter spouted news about road closures and late trains. He grinned at me. “Baby girl. Merry Christmas.”

“Burn mine a bit,” I told him. I liked my pancakes well done, but he was two steps ahead of me and had a plate already waiting at the dining-room table.

Mom came downstairs a few minutes later. “Where’s Colin? Is he not home yet?”

“He came home at around four a.m. I was already up.”

“Why were you up so early?” I asked around a bite of pancakes with extra syrup.

Mom poured me a cup of coffee looking equally perplexed.

“After getting jumped on and shoved out of bed for roughly twenty years of my life every Christmas morning, it’s just kind of a reflex at this point. I sat down here and watched the news.”

“So Colin is here?”

“No, he said he’s coming over later and left.”

“Why did he come back?”

Dad gestured with his hands, frustrated with our questions. “Call him, I don’t know. He put something under the tree and told me he’d be back for breakfast, so I’m sure he’ll be here any minute now.”

Mom and I exchanged confused glances before getting up and rushing to the living room. Dad, hot on our heels with spatula in hand, threw complaints our way that we were letting our breakfast get cold, but I was already on my hands and knees, wading through a sea of presents from not only my parents but my countless aunts and uncles.

My fingers found an envelope. It could be nothing. But something in my soul told me it was significant, so I pulled it from beneath the tree and sat back, turning it over.

My name was written neatly in the bold scrawl I knew was Mason’s handwriting. My heart quaked, then stopped completely.

No one said a word as my fingers drifted over my name.

I tucked it back beneath the tree. “Later,” I whispered, more to myself than to my parents, who were standing behind me looking unsure and unsteady. I rose, dusting my hands on my thighs, and I walked back to the kitchen. I sat down and started shoveling pancakes in my mouth, my vision blurring with tears.

It wasn’t until two hours later, surrounded by wrapping paper and ribbons, that the envelope ended up back in my hands.

This was it. Mason was going to tell me this was over. I expected to find a check written in my name, which honestly would have been worse than a note saying he couldn’t do this, that the Colin issue complicated too much, that I wasn’t in his league and he’d finally come to his senses about that.

Mom and Dad excused themselves while I sat motionless on the floor. I briefly heard Mom answering her phone in a huff, yelling at Colin, who’d failed to show up on Christmas morning to open presents like we always did.

“Colin, you’re on speaker phone. What the hell is the matter with you? First last night, now this?” Mom’s voice echoed from the kitchen.

“Did she open it yet?” Colin asked, breathless.

“Open what?” Dad barked as I looked over at them.

“The letter. Did she open it yet?”

They looked at me. I looked down at the letter and tore it open. My heart stopped the moment my eyes roamed over the words, “Do you want to have a snowball fight?”