Page 64 of Christmas Is All Around
“Then let me provide a bit of context that she might not have added,” he said.
“Oh, there was zero context,” she said, her voice sounding bitter to her own ears now.
“Eloise recognized you the evening we met you,” he said, his voice carefully even, his eyes on the road ahead. “And she had just read that goddamn article a few days earlier, so she knew you were—um…” He hesitated, clearly looking for a delicate way to sayhated by an unhinged faction of people on the internet. “… on the minds of people, at that moment.”
Charlotte snorted at this, and his mouth twitched.
“So she was thinking that if we all became friends somehow, you might agree to do us a favor. And when she cooked up the idea of the prints to sell at the gift shop, she thought it would be killing two birds with one stone if we could also… befriend you.”
“Befriend,” she repeated, incredulous.
“I swear, that’s all it was,” he said, glancing over at her. “This isn’t a bad novel, and she didn’t ask me to play a Jane Austen villain and try to seduce you for my own gains, or whatever. It doesn’t matter, in any case, because I initially said no—it seemed invasive and sort of disturbing.”
“And then you slept on it, and used your little accountant brain, and realized that this was too good a possibility to pass up?” she asked with considerable acid in her voice.
“No.” He shook his head vehemently. “I wasn’t lying to you in the coffee shop that day. I looked up your website and was truly impressed by your work—it had nothing to do with your name, and I genuinely thought it was a good opportunity for both us and you. It’s why I came to discuss it with you, rather than Eloise; I told her point-blank that I wasn’t going to try to—I dunno—weasel my way into your affections, or whatever the fuck she had in mind.”
“So you’re expecting me to believe that everything that happened between us was real, and you just happened to fall for the personwho your sister had specifically targeted for, like, some sort of weird publicity scheme?”
“Why do you think I never asked you to do anything?” he asked, sounding frustrated. “Why do you think I seemed so reluctant when you offered to let Eloise use your photo for the film screening?”
“Guilty conscience?”
“Well, yeah—and because it just all seemed extremely fucking creepy, honestly. I didn’t want anything that was happening between us to be…tainted, I guess.”
He fell silent then, and Charlotte turned in her seat to study him for a long moment. She could believe him, largely; she didn’t think he was some sort of sociopathic mastermind who had been hunting her down for his purposes, despite what her initial thoughts had been. She thought he was human, and he made mistakes, and he’d made a big one, this time, and had handled it the best way he could see to do so.
But…
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked softly. Sadly.
He didn’t respond for a long moment, his eyes on the road ahead, the increasingly bright lights of the village as they approached the high street.
“I couldn’t work out a way to tell you that you’d believe,” he said at last, turning at a roundabout to head to the train station.
“If you’d been honest, I’d have believed you,” she said as he slid the car into one of the parallel spots in front of the station. He pulled up the parking brake and turned off the car, but she was already unclicking her seat belt, her hand on the door handle. “Lane—Charlotte,” he said, the slightest pleading note entering his voice for the first time. “I should have told you sooner, I know that—but please don’t leave like this.”
She looked at him for a long moment—at his stupid, handsomeface. She noted how tired he looked, with dark circles beneath his eyes, visible even behind his glasses. She wondered how many sleepless nights he’d spent poring over Eden Priory’s finances, trying to work out a way to save this place that he loved so much.
“I’ve spent twenty years trying to escapeChristmas, Truly,” she said. “I literallycame herebecause I didn’t want anything to do with it—because I’m sick of even talking about it, Jesus Christ. It would be nice tonothave to think about something I did when I was nine years old for more than a week at a time, you know. And now, with this… I’d always think about it, when I thought of you. Of us.” She shook her head. “I can’t let this be something else that it hangs over. I just… can’t do this.”
And then, feeling like a bit of a coward, she opened her door and fled into the station before he had time to reply.
And told herself, as she stood on the platform, awaiting her train, that she didn’t care what he would have said anyway.
But deep down, she knew it wasn’t true.
CHRISTMAS DAY
CHAPTER NINETEEN
In an ideal world, she wouldn’t have spent Christmas morning slightly drunk, but this, clearly, was not an ideal world.
She had managed, somehow, to come home the night before and behave like some semblance of a normal human being. Ava and Kit had been too caught up in the Christmas Eve festivities to ask too many questions about Charlotte’s suspiciously red eyes. There had been the last-minute flurry of gift wrapping, of making a dessert for the following day, of—much to Charlotte’s dismay—a forced viewing ofIt’s a Wonderful Life, which on the one hand was terrible because it was the longest movie ever made, but on the other hand at least viewed Christmas through about as cheerful a lens as she did, which had always been a point in its favor.
Given the length of the movie, she hadn’t gone to bed until late, though, mercifully, she’d been able to sleep until a humane hour this morning, because Alice—say what you liked about her (and Charlotte had said plenty)—had one enormous factor in her favor: She was ababy, which meant thatshe didn’t know it was Christmas.
Charlotte was certain that in future years, she’d be awoken by amercenary cackle at five a.m., but this year, blessedly, the demon baby slept until seven.
