Page 86 of So This Is Christmas

“My mother doesn’t ski. I can remember trips, in more prosperous times before my father left, when we’d all go to a ski resort. My father and siblings and I would ski, and my mother would visit the spa and drink hot toddies by the fire and read. She used to joke about how much she loved not skiing on ski trips.”

“I can see that being a great time with your family, but this trip was a disaster from start to finish. Remember the tattoo?”

She laid her palm over her chest at the spot where the littlehigh-heel tattoo was, and his whole body tensed, as if it somehow knew he wasn’t going to like what she said next. “I do,” he said carefully. As if he could forget. The image of her sprawled languorously in his bathtub was going to be burned into his brain for all time.

“That story was from this trip. There was a formal dinner the last night. We were supposed to dress up. The boys had suits; the girls wore dresses. Because I was seventeen and stupid, I went to the dinner with my ‘cast’ on one foot and a high heel on the other.”

He could see it. He wanted to ask her if she’d worn her hair up in those days, too, but he didn’t want to interrupt what was clearly a story she needed to tell—and a story he very much wanted to hear.

“There was this guy I liked.” She rolled her eyes again. “We’d been flirting at school, and on the trip. He invited me to his room after the dinner and...” She made a “hurry up” gesture. “You know the rest.”

“Is the rest that he attacked you, and you stabbed him with your high heel?” he asked, alarmed.

She blew out a breath he took to meanyes. “It was complicated by the fact that I was willingly making out with him. I just didn’t want it to go any further than that. I was still very Catholic in those years.”

“I don’t think your willing participation up to a certain point complicates matters whatsoever.”

“Well, now that we live in the Me Too era and we’re all enlightened, we know it doesn’t. Buthedidn’t know that. And more to the point,Ididn’t know that. I felt terrible when I first started pushing him away. Like it was my fault. I was apologizing, even,if you can believe it. But then things started to get ugly, and instinct kicked in. I grabbed my shoe and stuck it into his thigh.”

Matteo thought for a moment that she was about to cry. She was pressing her lips together rather fiercely and her shoulders had risen in such a way that it looked like she was bracing herself.

“Cara.” He laid his hand on her shoulder, at a loss for how to comfort her.

She relaxed a bit, leaning into his touch. Perhaps he didn’t have to say anything. Perhaps his presence was enough. The thought was buoying. Matteo was used to being needed, but not like this. “It was all pretty terrible, but you should have heard the sound he made,” she said, sounding more like herself. She gave a little snort of laughter. “And then he couldn’t ski the next day, either, but he couldn’t tell anyone what had happened.”

“That’s a bit of poetic justice.”

“Yeah. That part was actually kind of amusing. I know I was supposed to experience it all as a big trauma. Itwasupsetting. But it was also a little bit funny, the next day anyway.”

“I think it can be both.”

“Both upsetting and funny?”

“Yes.”

“You know, you are kind of smart sometimes.”

“Sometimes!” he teased, wanting to lighten the mood. He sensed she wanted to be done talking about this.

He was wrong. She turned thoughtful. “It’s funny. I never think about skiing. It doesn’t come up that much in New York City. And I would have said I was over the whole thing, that even if it was traumatic, it was firmly in my past. But I think that might havebeen a lie. Because why else did I flip out so thoroughly when any of you mentioned skiing?”

“To be fair, I don’t think you flipped out. You communicated that you had no interest in skiing, but I didn’t see any flipping out.”

“I flipped out internally.”

“I think sometimes the burdens that we carry around are invisible even to ourselves.”

She looked at him with what seemed an awful lot like tenderness, and said, “Okay, you’re smart more than sometimes. You’re smart a lot of the time.”

“What was this boy’s name?” he asked, though he wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t as if he was going to activate his network and have the man murdered, though part of him wanted to do exactly that.

“His name was Brad!”

“Truly?”

“Truly. Except he wasn’t Bradley; he was Bradford. Bradford Worthington III.”

“I must say, you do seem to be rather persecuted by Brads.”

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