And you. He didn’t say it. Largely because it didn’t need to be said. It just was. Like breathing. Like the beauty of Christmas at the Riverview Inn.
“We…we should go,” she said, opening the truck door and letting in the freezing cold air. She was about to slip out but he grabbed her hand. Too much, maybe, but he had to know where things stood. It felt a little like he was pushing on something that he shouldn’t be pushing on.
But at the touch of his hand on hers, she stopped.
“I wish I knew how to not hurt you,” he said, and she looked up at him.
“You’re not hurting me,” she whispered.
“They why are you running…?”
“I’m not hurt,” she said. “I’m scared.”
“Of me?” He sat back, putting as much distance between them as he could. “I’m sorry. I swear—”
This time it was her hand reaching for his. The cold air made plumes of their breath. But when her fingers touched his they were warm.
“I’m scared of what you make me feel, Cameron,” she said with a wry twist to her mouth. “I always have been. And that…I mean, I can’t believe it, but it hasn’t changed.”
“What do I make you feel, Josie?”
She smiled, but it shook at the edges. She blew out a long breath and it, too, was shaky. “Everything,” she answered. “You make me feel everything. Everything I told myself I didn’t want to feel anymore.”
13
MAX
The ceiling had nothing to say. It never did. He’d been staring up at this ceiling since Cameron left all those years ago and not once had there been any insight from it or the fan or the spiderweb in the corner.
It was just him and his mistakes.
“Max?” Delia’s sleepy mumble at his shoulder made him turn his head.
“Go back to sleep,” he whispered and kissed her forehead.
“What time is it?”
He looked toward the window, the sheers lighter now than then they’d been when he initially woke up.
“Seven, maybe?”
She groaned and burrowed closer to him, and he could feel her, the way he always did, fall back to sleep. The slight loosening of her body, the easing of her mind. All the energy that was Delia awake, but turned down several notches.
We made a mistake, he wanted to say. No, that wasn’t right. I made the mistake. All those years ago. I made a terrible mistake.
He eased away from Delia, replacing his body heat, which was what Delia primarily wanted him for on these cold mornings, with the quilt, tucking it up around her shoulders.
She smiled in her sleep and he ached with love for her.
With the love he had for what they had built.
He’d spent the first year after Cameron left telling himself that he’d made the decision because he was protecting his family. All while missing Cameron with a pain so sharp it hurt to take a deep breath—like Cameron somehow wasn’t part of his family. Wasn’t the first son he’d always dreamed of, long before Dom came into being.
The house was quiet and cool and he walked into the kitchen expecting to find Josie beating her laptop into submission. But the kitchen and living room were empty. He walked back toward her bedroom but the door was open, the covers on her bed hastily pulled back up.
Dom was in his room. His gigantic son with the wicked slap shot and the subversive sense of humor. His feet hung off the bed and his head was buried in the pillows, only his hair visible.
What would I have done if it had been Dom in Cameron’s position?
The answer, to his great chagrin, was—everything different. He would have protected him and talked to him about everything that happened. There would have been more conversation. Not less. More support. Not less.
He walked back into the dark kitchen.
Snow was starting. Christmas Eve was in two days and the forecast was calling for snow every one of those days. Cameron, if he was going to leave, or Josie, if she was going to leave, weren’t going to be going anywhere after today.
Was that good or bad? he wondered.
Years ago, after the shooting that had cost him his job in the city, after he’d made that horrible mistake and a whole family had had to pay for it, he’d lived in this kind of…blank space. He tried very hard not to think anything. Or feel anything.
Delia and Josie had pulled him out of that into a Technicolor, wildly and deeply emotional world.
And he’d been grateful for it every day. Like, on his knees grateful. But every time he looked at Josie, he saw the same kind of blank space. Yeah, she was busy and important and doing a job that she seemed to like…but that look in her eyes. He recognized it. And last night he’d seen it in Cameron.
I’m not your employee anymore.
God, the words had been bullets right through his heart. But the look in Cameron’s eyes had been worse. All that distance Cameron and Josie were putting between themselves and the world. All that distance between themselves and love.
Max had some work to do. He was still the Family Officer for the county and Christmas was usually a time when kids got into trouble. No school to keep them occupied. Home lives in trouble. So he and Dante at the parole office had been trying to keep some of the most at-risk kids in the area busy. Delivering food. Shoveling sidewalks. The usual.
As he opened up his email, he remembered so clearly how he’d been desperate to do the same for Cameron. And how Cameron had fought and fought and fought…
Until he got tired. The way so many of those kids got tired. Of pretending they didn’t need love and boundaries and to use their bodies and brains and be respected for what they could do.
And then Alice had taken Cameron into the kitchen and it had been game over for the boy. He’d found himself, found something he cared about and someone to help him learn it.
And I took all of that away.
The guilt was a fresh hot spike in his chest.
Max and Dante exchanged emails regarding some shoveling they were planning to do in town in the next week and which kids they were going to get involved. He wondered if Cameron would be interested in helping out. After all those years of fighting Cameron was the first guy to sign up for these kinds of thing.
But then he wondered if Cameron would still be here in a week.
If he was still here now.
And suddenly he had an urgent need to know. To see the kid. To try, the way he hadn’t been able to the previous night, to repair what had gone so wrong between them.
He closed the laptop, left the rest of the coffee for when Delia woke up, and shrugged into his coat. It had been a long time since he’d been down at the lodge in the morning, but he found himself looking forward to it.
Alice’s bread, the black tar she pretended was coffee. The hum and business of the kitchens. Dad coming in to light the fires.
And Cameron.
Snow was falling, and so he skid a little when he braked at the stop sign. Turning on his right blinker, he saw the taillights to a van heading left down the road, toward Daphne and Jonah’s place.
“Shit,” he muttered, hoping he hadn’t missed his chance.
The snow was coming down hard, and when he parked in the back, where the van usually sat, the snow was already filling in its tracks. The air smelled cold and crackly, which usually meant they were going to get a real storm. Josie had used Delia’s truck to come down here at dawn, apparently, and he parked beside it.