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.
In the time it took him to walk from the truck to the back door, snow had gathered in his hair. Along his jacket.
The warmth of the Riverview kitchen enveloped him the way it always did, like arms coming around him. The smell of coffee, lasagna, and bread didn’t hurt.
“If you’re looking for the kids you just missed them,” Alice said, wiping off the last of her big baking trays and putting it in the rack beside the oven.
“I’m guessing you mean Cameron and Josie?”
She smiled, one side of her mouth lifting as much with bitterness as with joy. “Coffee?”
“Sure.”
“Lasagna?”
“For breakfast?”
“Like you don’t want it.”
He pulled out one of the stools at the island and sat. Alice poured him a cup and brought him a slab of lasagna that practically hung over the edges of the plate. He picked up his fork but couldn’t quite find the will to eat it.
“You all right?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “ You?”
“I spent the morning cooking with Cameron. I didn’t think that would ever happen again.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t suppose you did.” They sat in silence.
“You have something you want to get off your chest?” she asked him.
“Do you?” he shot back.
She poured herself the last of the coffee and sat down at the island beside him.
“We handled that night all wrong,” he said. Alice nodded.
She swallowed, so clearly carrying such a load on her shoulders. He’d grown used to living with women after so many years of just him and his brother and dad, and he knew the therapeutic importance of hugs.
But Alice wasn’t a hugger.
He covered her hand with his and she immediately grabbed him, holding on tight.
“They loved each other.”
“I know.”
“A real and honest love.”
Shit. “I know.”
“And even if it never became anything more, they deserved a chance to have that first real love. That first love is how you learn to love. And how you learn who you are in love. And how to live inside it. And we…we took that away from them.”
“We broke up their friendship. And they needed each other,” he said. “Josie…I feel like Josie has been so alone since he left.”
“And it feels like Cameron has just put everything that happened before he left…away. We started a five questions interview yesterday and I brought up his mom and it was like…” She shook her head. “…I’d smacked him.”
“I asked for his help last night and he said he wasn’t my employee anymore.”
“He may never forgive us.”
“But what about Josie?”
“They left here together to deliver the food.”
“They did?” In his chest he felt a flicker of hope. He had a lot of reasons to both trust and distrust hope. It was fickle and could turn on a person on a dime. But if he’d learned anything in these years with Delia, making a family, building a home, it was that if you didn’t have hope—even when you feared its eventual extinction—you had nothing.
“They were smiling.”
He blew out a breath. “That’s something.”
“Let’s not start congratulating ourselves yet. We still have a mess to clean up.”
JOSIE
There was always a lot of mayhem at Haven House. And even though the school and offices were officially on break, there were a lot of families there.
A lot of kids.
And it was like Christmas had barfed all over the place. Kids’ drawings and paper chains and holiday lights covered every square inch of wall.
“I forgot about this part!” Josie said as she and Helen and Cameron carried food into the dining room while kids rushed by. She lifted a tray of lasagna up so it didn’t bean a kid in the head.
“Hold up!” Daniella, an older Black woman who was once a resident and was now the day-to-day manager of the kitchen, stopped the kids at the end of the hallway. “You turn yourselves around and go help them bring in the food.”
The kids turned, faces beaming, and started running back toward them. “Walk!” Daniella shouted, and the kids immediately slowed down.
“That is a superpower,” Cameron murmured.
“Oh, it smells so good,” Daniella said. “Bring it in. Bring it on in.”
They stepped into the kitchen, which was a larger version of the one in the Riverview since the remodel a few years ago. It looked big enough to hold all the cooking classes it could run.
They set down the lasagna and the kids came running in after them with foil-wrapped loaves of bread in their arms.
Helen brought up the rear with the salad. “There’s still more in the van.”
Cameron and Josie walked out of the kitchen and into the hall, their shoulders bumping each other, and Josie shifted away, suddenly self-conscious, and stepped behind him.
“You okay?” he asked.
Just completely and totally in my own head and making a fool of myself. “Just fine!” she said over-brightly, deeply rattled by what had happened in the truck. He shot her a quizzical grin and opened the door to the snowy cold outside. They brought in the last of the food. And Helen and Daniella were strategizing in the kitchen, figuring out the timeline for dinner and delivery to the church.
“Are we going to deliver food in town?” Cameron asked.
“The roads are too bad,” Daniella said. “We’re gonna feed everyone here tonight and hopefully deliver tomorrow.”
Cameron nodded, though he was undoubtedly imagining what Alice would have to say about the shape her salads would be in by the next day.
“But don’t you worry,” Daniella said with a bright twinkle in her eyes. She was the kind of short woman who always seemed taller on account of all her personality and power. “I’ve got a job for you.”
“Wrapping,” Cameron said. “I knew it.”
“It won’t be that bad,” Josie said, reaching over to push on his arm.
“You know, you say that every time, and every time it is paper-cut city.”
“Well, come on,” Daniella said, leading them from the kitchen down another hall to the meeting room that always got taken over for presents and wrapping.
“You coming?” Josie asked Helen over her shoulder.
Helen shook her head, a smile teasing her lips. “I think you two have it covered.”
Josie stepped back into the kitchen.
“Don’t,” she said in a low voice.
“Don’t what?” Helen asked innocently.
“Don’t be too pleased with yourself,” Josie said. “This could have gone another way entirely.” She thought of Max and Cameron, and the tension between them, and the tension she still had with Alice. “It still could.”
Helen sobered. “You should have been friends all this time. I was just trying to make something that was really wrong a little bit right.”
Yeah. Josie knew that. And, frankly, she was glad her friend had staged this reunion. Whatever happened next. Seeing him again was so sweet. “Thanks,” she said, squeezing her friend’s hand. “It is really good to see him.”
“See him?” Helen asked, waggling her eyebrows.
“It’s not like that,” Josie said, not quite able to hide her blush.
“Oh, honey,” Helen said. “Between you two, it’s always like that.”
Uncomfortable with that insight, Josie left the kitchen and walked into the meeting room where Cameron was sitting on the floor surrounded by red and white wrapping paper and silver bows and long silver ribbon. Bows the size of Josie’s hands. And on one side of the room were stacked presents. Presents for the kids and moms in Haven House and other presents for families in town that needed help getting something under a tree.
“That…that’s a lot of gifts,” she said.
“Paper-cut city,” he said, shaking his head. “We better get to work.”
The system was simple. Kids got green paper. Grownups got red paper. Silver ribbon for men. White ribbon for women. The kids’ ribbons were differentiated by age, not gender. Lots of Legos. Lots of books. Lots of science kits and bubbles and new hats and warm mittens. Jumping ropes and art supplies.
“Didn’t you come up with this ribbon system?” Cameron asked as they got down to business. They sat cross-legged beside each other, just like they always had. Knees touching. Reaching across each other for paper and tape.
“I did. Probably my single greatest achievement. Do you have the tape?”
He gaped at her. “You seriously just had it.”
“I know, but—”
“It’s under your knee.”
She stuck her tongue out at him like they were kids, and they settled into a rhythm she hadn’t felt in years.
“I was engaged,” he said. And it was like a needle scratching over a record. She felt those words in the back of her brain. “And my fiancée’s mother used to make these tiny, incredibly intricate dolls out of paper. She tried to teach me once but got so frustrated she had to walk away. ”
He taped the paper down on a box of Legos and, without measuring, cut the paper to cover the rest of it. She gasped in horror.
“What?” he said.
“You’ve got to measure.”
“What? It’s fine…” He folded the paper over the rest of the box, but it didn’t come close to matching up and most of the Lego logo was visible. “I’ll just cover that up with another piece of paper.”
“Or you could do this totally revolutionary thing and measure the paper around the box before you cut.”
“Yes. I could do that.”
“But you’re not going to?”
He untaped the cut paper and measured it around a smaller box and started wrapping that. Josie shook her head, laughing at him.
Silence settled down around them and it didn’t seem like he was going to bring up the fiancée. She told herself not to do it. What good could come of knowing the kind of woman he’d loved enough to want to marry? “Who was she?” Internally she winced. “Your fiancée?”
He blew out a breath. “A doctor in Kenya. We met about nine months after I left the States. And we had a few months of being pretty happy before we realized we’d made a mistake and we split up, amicably.”
“Really?”
“No. She broke my heart but good.” He smiled at Josie and she saw that he was joking, but it was true, too. And she forced her face to smile.
“I had been traveling for a year when we met and I was ready to settle down. I wanted children and a house, and I thought she wanted the same.”
“She didn’t?”
“She’d gotten a four-year grant to study retinoblastoma in children living in remote villages in Burundi.”
“You didn’t want to go?”
“No, I would have gone. But it was painfully obvious she didn’t want me to. She wanted to focus all her energy on her work and…” He shrugged. “I respected her for it. And bowed out.”
“And you’ve never gotten close again?” she asked.
“No.” He set the wrapped present in the stack of gifts with green ribbons. “What about you?”
“Me what?”
“Come on, now, Josie. I told you.”
“No one. Really.” She focused all of her attention on the pretty, warm slippers she was wrapping for some lucky mom.
“I’m not believing that. Smart and beautiful and kind and funny—you had guys mobbing you in high school.”
“I was just so busy, I guess.”
“Too busy to date?”
“I don’t know, Cameron. I had a crush on you in high school, graduated and developed a complex that I’d sexually harassed you and gotten you kicked out of the only home you ever had, so I didn’t really know how to be…casual. Or even available for any of that.”
His silence was stunned and she didn’t look at him for a long time. Her plan had backfired. Magnificently. But soon his silence became unbearable and she glanced up to see his open-mouthed astonishment.
“What?” she asked, not liking the way he was looking at her. “I should have been different? I should have handled you leaving better? I was mourning you, Cameron. I was—” Oh god, she was going to cry. She pressed her fingers to her eyes and wished she had a tissue for her nose that was suddenly dripping. Great. Just great.
“Hey,” he whispered. And he was right there. She could feel him there. The warmth of his body and his breath. His heart.
“I’m fine.” She took a deep breath and did what she did best—smiled her way through it. As long as she didn’t look at him or…touch him, she’d be fine.
“Josie?” And then the jerk had to go and touch her, his fingers against her chin. Pulling her face up so she had to look into his eyes while bearing the incendiary heat of his hand.
Stop, she wanted to say. Stop making this so hard.
But when her eyes met his she saw clearly what he saw. What the family didn’t see. Her friends and coworkers.
“Have you been alone all this time?” he asked.