Page 101 of The Love Losers

“But the door…I didn’t…”

“He climbed the trellis, just like Romeo. Love makes a person young. Now, be a dear, and let him sleep a little.”

“Doesn’t he need to clear the roads?”

“Oh, he will, but he just cleared my roads, and he needs rest before he gets back to work.”

“Uh…”

“So if you hear the door, just know that it’s my friend returning to work. He has an important job.”

“Uh, okay. But please let me know if you’re going to have more midnight guests, Joy. We’re trying to keep everyone safe here.”

“So is he,” she says, so passionately I almost believe she does have a snowplow lover in her bed. “So is he.”

The door creaks shut, there’s a pause, and then Declan’s footsteps retreat.

Thank God.

Several seconds later, I pull the covers down and find Joy grinning at me. “I always wanted to be an actress,” she says.

“You’d be good at it.”

“Rosie’s room is down the hall. Second door to the right. And Anthony?”

“Yes?”

She gives me the look of a disapproving school teacher. “Break all the beds you’d like, but don’t break her heart. That girl is everything to me.”

“Me too,” I say, my voice raw.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

ROSIE

I’d thought the worst Christmas ever was the one after my parents died.

One month after they died, to the day.

We hadn’t put up a tree or done anything to mark the occasion, and I’d woken up in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve, a hole in my chest, because it had occurred to me that my mother would have been disappointed. So I’d taken a box out of the attic and decorated the house in the night like Buddy the Elf, except I was crying the whole time. When my brothers got up, Declan was so kind to me, and I had started laughing hysterically because I could suddenly see the whole thing from his point of view. He’d gone to bed in a normal house and woken up to three boxes’ worth of decorations gone wrong—crooked stars and half-hearted garland and a fake tree that was only half-decorated and looked like it belonged in a trash heap.

Then three of us had gotten good and drunk, and later that night, we’d gone outside to peer up at the stars.

“I vote that Declan has to clean up the Christmas crap,” Seamus had said, grinning over at me.

“Can I throw it all away when I’m done?” my big brother had said.

“Nope,” I’d said, bumping my shoulder into him. “You’ll tuck it away carefully, like a damn gentleman.”

And he had. He really had. He probably would have said Seamus was a lazy lug, because my middle brother had watched a movie with me while Declan was doing the cleaning, but I knew better.

Seamus had known what I needed—one brother to erase what I’d done, and the other to distract me from it.

Maybe he was part of what I needed right now, because this Christmas was even worse than that one had been.

Leave me and my family alone…

It kept running through my head on a loop, and each time it broke me a little more.

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