And he turned and left.
The Mitchell family was quiet behind him. Speechless. The reverse, maybe, of the shattering glass of before. He’d leave—again. And everything would go back the way it was supposed to be.
And he grabbed his winter coat, swung his heavy bag over his shoulder, and headed outside. He’d rented a car for this trip, thinking in the back of his head that he would need a getaway option.
And it sat at the side of the road, a nondescript dark sedan. He’d never been so happy about the decisions that past him had made.
He fished the keys out of his pocket and hit the fob.
There was the sound of feet behind him and he didn’t turn to see who had followed him.
Helen, maybe. The instigator.
Alice? He’d write her an email, explaining everything. She’d understand. For a long time she’d had her own sharp edges that kept people from getting too close.
Josie?
He hoped not. Couldn’t imagine it. He’d spent the first year of his exile imagining her finding him in his tiny apartments and hectic jobs. In Baltimore and Wyoming. San Francisco and Vancouver.
All while deleting pictures of her from his phone. Ignoring her emails.
He’d had to leave the continent to leave that daydream behind.
“Cameron?”
Jesus. It was Max.
Cameron sighed and stopped. Not because he wanted to talk to the guy. But because he knew Max wasn’t going to let up and this whole thing could end with Cameron running him over with the car or some bullshit.
He turned to face Max. “Max, I think we can both admit it was a mistake for me to come. I never should have—”
Max just kept walking. Not stopping, and Cameron felt the way he had that night, like Max might hit him. And he wasn’t a boy anymore, and if it was going to come to that, to a god damn fistfight with his old mentor, then—fine. Weirder shit had happened.
He shrugged out of his backpack and changed up his stance. Max was still big and strong, and he had that ice-hard I’ve-killed-a-man edge to him that had always frankly terrified Cameron, but Cameron had been broke and homeless on the streets of Bangkok on more than one occasion.
He knew how to handle himself.
“Jesus, Max!” he shouted as the old guy got close, and he threw out an arm, a loosely gathered fist because, honest to god, he didn’t want to hit the man. But Max grabbed him by the shoulders, his dark eyes searching Cameron’s, and Cameron tried to step back but Max wouldn’t let him.
“I’m so sorry,” Max said, and wrapped his arms around Cameron.
He held himself still—shades of the glass breaking—before pushing at the guy’s chest.
“Max—”
“I’m so goddamn sorry, and if I was a better man—”
“Stop!” Cameron said, but Max just kept hugging him and talking. Cameron could only stand there and take it.
“I’ll leave,” Max said. “Just come back inside. Alice is ready to burn the place down and Helen is crying. I’ll make myself scarce.”
Cameron slumped in the man’s embrace, enough that Max must have gotten the sense that Cameron wasn’t going to fight him anymore and let him go.
Cameron looked over Max’s shoulder at the inn. Alice was standing in the doorway. He could see how anxious she was. He could feel it, practically. She was the only mom he’d ever known, really. Anything good that grew in his life, he could trace the roots back to her.
To Max, too, in a lot of ways.
It wasn’t comfortable. But there it was.
“It just seems…”
“Like a lot?” Max finished.
Cameron huffed. “You guys are always a lot,” he said. “But this maybe…maybe it’s just too much. It’s Christmas, and I think I’m a bad memory—”
Max sucked in a breath. “I’m so sorry you think that.” He shook his head, and to Cameron’s total and utter shock the former cop seemed to be about to cry. “Because you’re not.”
“That night is,” Cameron said. He would not be put off by platitudes. He wanted to say Josie is in there crying. But he couldn’t even say her name.
Max shook his head, so sad. “Not…for the reasons you think. Everyone regrets what happened. All of us. And if you come in…”
“We’re going to be one big happy family?” Cameron asked.
“Yes.”
“I wasn’t part of the family, Max. I was an employee.”
“You were much more than that, Cameron. So much more. And even if you don’t remember that, I do. Alice does. Everyone in there does. Josie—”
Cameron lifted his hand and Max, thank god, shut his mouth.
Cameron glanced up at the tops of the trees, the slate-gray sky above them. There was going to be snow soon. He could smell it. Max had taught him that. How the air changed in advance of weather. It had felt, learning it, like a stupid thing. But in his life on the road it had become a superpower.
I owe them so much.
“It’s Christmas, son—”
“Stop,” Cameron said. “Stop. I’ll come in. I’ll stay for dinner. Past that…we’ll go meal by meal, okay?”
Max blinked back his tears. “Meal by meal sounds familiar.”
“But you don’t call me son. Not ever again.”
Max nodded solemnly, like he understood it was the price of the past.
Cameron reached down for his backpack, but Max got there first.
“Good god, no wonder Garth fell over. What do you keep in there?”
“My home,” Cameron said. Max looked at him like he was joking, but he wasn’t.
He’d lost the only home he’d ever had, really. The only family.
He lived his whole life now making sure he didn’t have another one to lose.
7
JOSIE
Her first season working as an intern for the show had been the kind of season where everything went wrong. And since it had been her first year, she’d had no perspective on it. Josie had thought that things like the set catching on fire, and the costume department going on strike, and a stomach flu—the kind that created explosive diarrhea—burning its way through the cast were all normal.
She’d met every problem with the grim determination to control it. The way she couldn’t control any other thing.
Every season after that first season had been easier—which might be a part of why she stayed.
The rest of the night that Cameron came back to the Riverview was like that. After the shock of seeing him, the painful gut-clenching reaction to his obvious inability to look her in the eye, it wasn’t so bad.
When he walked away from the table and grabbed his things, clearly leaving, it hadn’t even registered in the atmosphere of shock in her brain.
When he and Max walked back in like nothing was really wrong, she didn’t know what to feel.
Relief? Dread?
So she used the great coping mechanism she always used.
She worked.
She cleared the dishes the squirrel had upset. She brought out new place settings. New silverware. When the oven timer went off and fresh bread was baked, she took care of it. Brought it out, sliced and wrapped in the cloth napkins that fresh bread was always wrapped in here at the Riverview.