Page 1 of Christmas in Paris
Chapter One
Ray
It had started as such a good day. There was the new job, for one thing. The job which was finally paying him enough that he and Ashley might be able to move from the dump of an apartment where Ray had been living since before Ashley had even been born. It was almost to the point where he could make those sorts of plans, and he had realized it when he had woken up that morning.
The energy shift must have been obvious to Ashley, too, because she didn’t just grunt in response to his wishing her a good morning. Instead, she had pushed her blonde hair out of her face, and for the first time in what felt like years, she had gotten past her teenaged angst enough to look him right in the eyes before she’d rushed off to school.
It was times like this, he mused to himself, as he walked into the office building where he had found a job doing reception work, that he could almost have hope. The hope that his relationship with his daughter wouldn’t always be as strained as it felt like it was these days. The hope that he wouldn’t always be living paycheck to paycheck. The hope that he could have a different life than what his had been for more than a decade and a half.
And, of course, it was probably completely and totally predictable that that would be exactly when everything would fall to pieces around him. It was the story of his life, it seemed. Though he tried to be more optimistic than that, sometimes, it was hard. He kept pulling himself up through sheer grit and determination, and just when he was starting to get his feet under him, something would push him right back down to the beginning again.
It was enough to make him want to scream sometimes or just give up. If not for Ashley, that would be exactly what he would do. He knew that he needed very little, but she was a different story. He could go hungry himself, but he could never let his daughter go hungry.
She was his first thought when he was called into the boss’s office right as he arrived at work. Ashley. God, how was he going to tell her? How was he going to keep putting food on the table and paying the rent? The truth was, he knew that he had been fired because the company was broke and filing for bankruptcy? They could call itlaid offall they wanted, but fired was fired.
The whole day he worried about it, sitting at his aging computer and desperately searching for some job, any job. But this close to the holidays, everyone had done their seasonal hiring. He sent out some resumes but didn’t hold out much hope. He might get lucky, but he was underqualified for every single one of those jobs. And he couldn’t say that he felt particularly lucky just then.
He had lots of time to think about it. Ashley had basketball after school, so it was almost dinner time by the time she breezed in, still flushed and glowing from the chill in the air outside. December would start in a few days, and he wasn’t even sure how he was going to afford groceries, much less any presents for her.
“Dad, oh my God,” Ashley burbled, her mouth already opening to speak probably before she even got into the room. “You won’t believe what Maddie said to me today …”
Ray tried his best—he really did—to pay strict attention. Ashley was so unpredictable. Sometimes she was barely willing to grunt at him, prickling at the slightest insult and storming off at a moment’s notice, and sometimes she was so cheerful that she was practically bouncing as she walked. He had learned to appreciate the cheerful, bouncy times and tried his best to ignore the grunting and rudeness.
“What did she say?” Ray prompted, but he could see that his act was not fooling his daughter. She was far too perceptive sometimes, and unfortunately for him, it seemed like this was one of those times.
“What’s wrong?” she demanded, and Ray let out a soft sigh, which he tried to disguise by turning away from her to poke at the food, although the spaghetti sauce that was cooking there really needed very little interference from him. But it was somewhere to look that wasn’t into her eyes. He didn’t want to see the worry there when he told her the truth, which he knew he was going to have to do.
“What did Maddie say to you?” Ray asked again, hoping against hope that he could put off the inevitable for a few more minutes. He just needed some time to figure out how he was going to say the words. There was a chance, however slight, that he would get away with it, right?
Wrong.
“Dad.” Ashley sounded just like her mother sometimes. It was a little spooky, considering that she hadn’t had any contact with the woman since she was little more than a baby. “Tell me. Something’s wrong.”
Ray took a deep breath and closed his eyes, which were suddenly stinging. His daughter was such a good person. She was honestly worried, and if he tried to hide this from her, she would not only see right through it, but it would only make her worry more.
“I got fired.”
It was a little bit blunter than he meant to be, but at least the words were out. But then there was nothing but silence from behind him, and he found himself rushing to fill that silence with words.
“Laid off, I mean. The company shut down. But don’t worry, Ash, I’ll find another job.”
He stopped, and she still hadn’t said anything. So he got brave and turned around, looking into her pale-green eyes and scanning her face. This was legitimately one of his favorite people in the whole goddamned world, and guiltily, it was a relief to have told her. At least he wasn’t alone with this anymore.
“Dad, did you forget?”
Her first words after being told were not at all what he had thought they would be. He just stopped and stared at her for a long moment, trying to draw the words into focus, trying to understand them, and she sighed and flipped her hair over her shoulder in a golden waterfall, rolling her eyes in that way that was the unique right of teenaged girls and would get anyone else likely punched in the face.
“Dad! Paris?”
And then it happened. The understanding that he had hoped for finally broke through like the sun dawning, but unfortunately what it shone light on was not the sort of thing that he wanted to see. He had forgotten completely about something that he had known was important to his daughter, and he felt immediate, intense guilt clawing at his guts. He’d been so distracted he had forgotten, and how could he? She had been talking about nothing else for months.
“I have money saved for that,” he admitted, although he was pretty sure it wasn’t quite enough. But he still had one more paycheck coming from the place that had just fired him. If he scrimped and saved from that paycheck, he should be able to come up with just enough.
“But if you don’t have a job, how are we going to pay rent and eat?” she asked, showing more maturity and practicality than most seventeen-year-olds would be able to pull off. She had grown up fast, maybe too fast. “I don’t think I should be going to Paris if it means that you aren’t going to pay rent because of it.”
With a soft sigh, Ray pulled dinner off of the stove and then turned to look at his daughter, pasting a smile that he hoped was convincing on his face. He wasn’t sure how well it came off, and for someone like Ashley, he had to be better than convincing. He had to be completely believable when he wasn’t at all sure about what his future was going to be. How was he supposed to reassure her when he couldn’t even reassure himself?
“Dinner’s ready. Let’s set the table,” he suggested, but he could feel her gaze boring into his back as he busied himself with the last stages of preparation. “Look, don’t worry about it, okay? You’re going on that trip. I promise.”
