Page 71 of The Holiday Heartbreaker

“I can’t stop thinking about you. I was not very happy that you didn’t call.” His eyes leveled with hers and she couldn’t breathe. “You said you would call me.”

“I can’t... I can’t. It’s too much. I... Benny is in the next room and...”

“I didn’t need a booty call, Elizabeth. I just wanted to know you were okay. You left really abruptly and I didn’t get a chance to make sure you were fine with everything that happened. And you said you’d call.”

“I’m fine with it,” she said. “I’m more than fine with it. You don’t need to...”

Benny chose that moment to come roaring back out of the house, scrambling straight for the pickup truck. He took the middle seat, and Elizabeth was actually sorry about it. Brody drove them to the edge of the ranch, where things became wild, and they got out. He grabbed a hatchet and they started walking down the path. Benny bounced ahead, and Elizabeth saw every slippery rock as a potential slipping hazard and fought the urge to tell him to be careful every two seconds. She knew it only drove him crazy. She was trying really hard to give him space. Because space was what he seemed to like best about this place.

“Did you always get your trees in the woods?” she asked, desperate to make conversation about the things so they wouldn’t end up in silence and get consumed by the tension arcing between them.

“Us? No. Hell no. In fact, we don’t do Christmas trees. We don’t really do Christmas. I don’t know. I feel like at one point maybe we kind of did? When we were little. But I don’t really remember it.”

The way that he shrugged his shoulders made her think that he was lying.

“You don’t remember?”

He cleared his throat. Short and sharp. And as they kept on walking through the trees, the pines looming overhead, dusted white, the sky crystal blue and clear all of a sudden, while the air stayed so cold their breath escaped in clouds, she was sure he was done talking.

But then he spoke. “All right. I remember one Christmas. And things didn’t go quite perfect and my dad was an absolute bear about it. He made everybody suffer. I think after that, it was just... Easier to not.”

She recognized that he was being vague on purpose.

“What happened?”

He fixed a stare at her. “It’s not a good story. I don’t think you want to hear it.”

“You don’t need to protect me from anything.”

He didn’t know, of course. About her past. About how things had started out for her. Because she hadn’t told him.

He thought that she was soft and that she came from a background she didn’t come from, because of how she presented herself. She knew that. She knew how she looked. How she came across, and what people thought about her. Because she had cultivated that image on purpose.

“He just... He didn’t like things that disrupted the daily routine, so he didn’t like holidays or any fuss like that. And he liked things being perfect.”

“What happened?”

“She burned dinner. On Christmas Eve. He went to the Christmas tree and burned everyone’s presents. Except mine.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. I shared mine,” he said quickly. “I didn’t keep them.”

It was clear he needed to say that, that he needed her to know that. How sad that he felt like he had to save the day when his dad had ruined it.

“Brody...” she said slowly. “It wouldn’t have mattered what you did. You were a child.”

“But I did. I shared them.” She could see that that was really important to him. To make it very clear that he had done his best to restore the balance.

“That was nice of you,” she said.

In that moment, for some reason, she tried to think of how she would talk to Benny. How you talked to a kid that had bought into some kind of alternate reality. You didn’t just tell them they were wrong. Or that it wasn’t real, not when their feelings were very real. You couldn’t do that. You had to listen to them.

“It wasn’t extra nice. I mean...it was the least I could do. There’s not much you can do with your siblings’ toys all getting burned.”

“I’m sorry that you went through that.”

Her birth mother hadn’t been cruel. From what Elizabeth could remember of her, she had just been neglectful. The times that she had gone back to be with her, they’d been mostly marked by long stretches of time in a room that was mostly empty, a mattress on the floor, and gnawing hunger.

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