Page 32 of The Duke Who Saved Christmas
They’d always selected the tree locations together, and I suspected this year’s overload was her way of both making up for not decorating to her usual level last year and feeling close to him this year.
Heck, putting up sixteen Christmas trees was a relatively healthy way of coping with grief, as far as I was concerned.
Or, rather, seventeen, given the undecorated one that was staring at me from the corner of the room.
I shook my head as I dipped some bread in the soup. Fine. Whatever she wanted. If seventeen Christmas trees made her happy and brought her peace for our first real Christmas without my dad, then she could have them. She could have two in every room, as long as they didn’t creep into my bedroom.
I knew this year was hard for her. I didn’t really count last year as being our first Christmas without my dad as it’d barely been a month since he’d died. I can barely remember it. The only things I remembered with any kind of clarity at all was Danny’s face when he’d realised Santa had been there, then my mum crying because she’d forgotten to dust footsteps in front of the fire with flour like Dad always used to.
I pulled my phone from my pocket and set a reminder for Christmas Eve at eleven p.m.
Dust footsteps in front of the fireplace.
Hell, I didn’t like Christmas. The past three had been nothing but pure pain for me, but I wasn’t going to ruin it for my nephew.
Even I could fake a little Christmas spirit for him.
He was the only person I could fake it for. I wasn’t even sure I could for Mum this year. Christmas was not only the reminder that my dad was no longer here, but the reminder that I was alone.
I should have been married.
I should have been facing my first Christmas as a married man with my new wife.
But I wasn’t.
I’d never let Sylvie know that her comment about me being single had hurt a little. Of course, she had no reason to know that my then-fiancée had accepted my proposal, set a wedding date, and then four days after my father’s terminal diagnosis, six months after I’d proposed to her, she’d left me.
On Christmas Eve.
Just upped and walked out with no reason whatsoever. To this day, Millie had never explained to me why she’d left that morning.
I’d also never seen the ring again, and I now wished I’d demanded it back before she left. I’d been too fucking shocked to do it at the time. I’d tried calling her only once after she’d left, and she’d already blocked my number.
Of course, now I knew what a bullet I’d dodged.
That didn’t mean that it didn’t hurt.
It was a very big knock on a time of the year that was already bad. Within four days I’d lost the woman I’d planned tospend the rest of my life with and found out that it was probably going to be the last Christmas with my dad.
Christmas…
It was too much loss for me.
Maybe that was why I was so angry at my sister. Not for grieving—she was entitled to do that in whichever way was best for her, but she wasn’t entitled to hurt others in the process. She most certainly wasn’t entitled to encourage her wife to get pregnant and not be there for the process.
It wasn’t as if my sister had impregnated her wife accidentally, after all.
I couldn’t imagine how hard it all was for Beth. Going through IVF virtually alone, both the failed implantations and the successful one, taking the test only for Zara to bail again…
I shook my head and rubbed my hand across my face. Beth was basically my sister after all these years, and I’d failed her, too.
Jesus. What a pit of self-pity I’d wallowed my way into.
My phone pinged from the counter in front of me and I picked it up. I had a text from an unknown number, and I frowned when I opened it.
UNKNOWN: I need Christmas trees.
I went from frowning to my eyebrows shooting upwards in the other direction.
