Page 3 of Ten Christmases Without You
“Hey there, Emmy-Lou,” said Uncle Stephen, Charlotte’s husband, using his own made-up pet name for her.
Her full name was Émilie Claire. The first-born child, she’d been given a French name to pay homage to her mother’s time in Paris. Emmy had always felt out of place responding to a name from a country she’d never been to. At some point, she’d been nicknamed Emmy, and it stuck.
“Hi, Uncle Stephen.” She stood and gave him a side hug.
He eyed her sweatshirt, and his brows pulled together but he didn’t say anything.
Emmy bit back the urge to flee and greeted Uncle Brian, Elsie’s husband.
“So you all surfaced finally?” Madison said to Jack as he came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders.
“Just for food.”
Emmy’s dad came back into the room. “Did I hear food?”
“It’s halftime,” Jack said, browsing the spread of loaded party plates on the kitchen island.
Madison leaned over and said into Emmy’s ear, “Want to go into the living room?”
Relieved by the offer, Emmy nodded. Family Christmas took a lot of energy, and Madison had a keen sense of when Emmy needed a break, which was pretty much immediately.
Madison grabbed the sketchbook and stood up. “Emmy and I are going to go add more logs to the fire.”
“Good idea,” Charlotte agreed as she loaded the CD player. “We’ll want it nice and toasty when we do the gift exchange.”
Emmy got up and followed her sister into the living room. Her attention moved to the inky blackness outside. Madison threw a log on the fire, making the flames crackle in the oversized fireplace. A faint tinkle of Christmas music floated into the room above the merry chatter coming from the kitchen. Uncle Stephen had started talking about something ridiculously obscure, as usual. Was it car motors?
Madison set the sketchbook on the table.
Emmy folded her arms and leaned against the window, the cold a quiet shock to the system, mirroring her comfort level. “Why did you bring my notebook in here?”
“I wanted to look through your sketches. I’d like to see them.”
“Maybe I can sit in here by myself all night and do a few more for you,” she teased.
“At some point, we’ll have to go back in there.” Madison nodded toward the two swinging doors separating the rooms.
“I don’t know which is worse: having to carry on a conversation with Uncle Stephen while he drops crumbs on his sweater, or the perplexed faces Aunt Elsie gives me whenever I say anything.” She squinted through the window into thedarkness, trying to find the break between the ground and the sky, but the starless night made everything look like velvet.
“I do have something to make the night a little more interesting.”
Emmy pulled away from the window. “What could possibly make this night interesting?”
“I invited Charlie Russell over.”
“Our backdoor neighbor?”
“Yeah. Remember I mentioned he works in the Chicago office? He’s always on our video calls. While we were waiting for a meeting to start, he mentioned he was going to be visiting his parents, so I told him to stop by.”
Emmy went over to Madison. “Why would he want to come overhere?”
Madison leaned in and said softly, “If his family is asentertainingas ours, he might want to escape too.”
They pulled apart as Aunt Elsie came in with a tray of the nonalcoholic, homemade eggnog that she made every year and set it on the coffee table before disappearing back into the kitchen.
“It might be good to have Charlie over—get some new blood in here,” Madison said.
Emmy rolled her eyes. “Why would you want to subject someone to this?”
