Page 4 of Christmas Creek Cowboy

For now, though, Emmy just focused on the immediate problem of what the heck they were going to do about the piles of mail that were now on her living room floor. A place they’d brought them shortly after Calen had retrieved the other three bags from the attic. Considering he’d cursed his way through a good portion of that retrieval, they’d both decided they needed privacy. No way would he have gotten that privacyin his office.

While Calen had started the counting and sorting, Emmy had changed out of the fairy costume. Iridescent gossamer wings were great for playing mystical woodland creatures, but they sucked for pretty much everything else. She needed to sit down to get through this.

Once she’d returned from changing into jeans and her favorite Harry Potter T-shirt, Emmy poured Calen a drink, grabbed a Pepsi for herself, and located pen and paperto make notes.

“Sixty-eight letters and cards in this one,” Calen announced after he’d finished counting the contents of bag number four. “And four small packages.”

Emmy jotted that down and did a quick total. The four bags had contained 212 letters and cards and thirteen packages.

Well, that total was almost true.

Emmy wasn’t counting the letter she’d removed from the bag before she had ever taken sack number one into Calen’s office. It’d been a shock to see it. The kind of shock that made a person say bad words and get weak in the knees. Both of which had happened. Because the letter hadbeen from her.

Andsent to Calen.

Seventeen years ago.

So much angst and agony had gone into the writing of that particular correspondence when she’d been eighteen. She had nearly chickened out many times before she had finally dropped it into the box outside the post office, certain it would end up in Calen’s hands. Clearly, it hadn’t, because it’d been sitting in an old mail bag in Waylon’s attic all this time. Seeing it there had certainly clarified a few things.

Like why Calen had never mentioned her letter.

Like why he’d continued to treat her as the friend she had always been to him.

Since she was now in possession of some 20/20 hindsight, Emmy realized it was a good thing he’d never gotten the letter. Because if he had, everything between them would have changed. They might not even be friends now, and after the heart crushing she’d taken over Owen’s cheating, she desperately needed Calen’s friendship. Then again, if Calen had read the letter, maybe she wouldn’t have gotten involved with Owen in the first place.

Apparently, hindsight was a gift that kept on giving, and in this case, it was doling out plenty of doubts and what-ifs for her.

Calen was no doubt going through his own what-ifs, and while he’d spent the first hour of this visit just going through each bag and counting so they’d have a total, Emmy knew him. Knew that one letter he’d put in the center was gnawing away at him. Heck, it was gnawing away at her too, but she refused to play what-if with this one. Best to treat it like the emotional keg of dynamite that it almostcertainly was.

Because it was addressed to Daddy.

Emmy had no doubt that Calen had done the math on this one too, and he knew the letter had been sent when he was eighteen. Ironically, it’d been postmarked the same day Emmy had sent her own letter to Calen.

“It can’t be meant for me,” Calen muttered after he took yet another shot of the whiskey she’dpoured for him.

Even though the counting was done, Calen continued to sit on the floor and stare at the red envelope with the ho-ho-ho-ing Santa stamp and the child’s drawing of a snowman. Correction—a possible snowman. It could have also been a white poop emoji, but considering the holiday theme, it likely wasn’t the latter.

One thing for certain was that Calen hadn’t been the one to send it. At eighteen, he’d been long past the point of childhood drawings and such. So that meant someone else, a child, had mailed it to someone he or she thought of as Daddy.

Again, that meant it wasn’t for Calen, unless he’d knocked up someone when he was twelve or so. When Emmy looked at him consideringly, he gave her a scowl.

“No, just no,” he insisted. “I didn’t have sex untilI was fifteen.”

She knew that. Knew, too, that overly perky cheerleader Mandy Tarkington had been the one. After that, it was a string of girls who’d obviously seen that Calen was the hottest guy in Christmas Creek. Emmy had seen it as well, but she’d never managed to catch him at the right time when both had been available. Then they’d ended up dating best friends Owen and Sasha, so Calen and she had become best friends as well.

Of course, Owen and Sasha had stretched their bestie status when they’d screwed around with each other, but that was a whine best saved for later. For now, she contemplated the Daddy letter while she chugged not booze but more Pepsi. Emmy had learned the hard way over the years that it was best to keep a clear head when dealing with stuff she couldn’t wrap her mind around.

“It’s like looking at multiple hornets’ nests,” Calen remarked. Sighing, he eyed the stacks and bundles as if they were indeed insectsready to swarm.

And he wasn’t far off in that opinion.

Even if she disregarded the child’s letter and the one she’d tucked away in her purse, Emmy could see plenty of possible bombshells. Like the one addressed to Dillon Mercer from his sister’s college roommate, Elise, who’d visited Christmas Creek several times. The handwriting on the letter looked awfully flowery, and according to the postmark, it would have been sent while Dillon wasstill married.

Then, there was the one from Gladys Herman to Clive Dunbar, both of whom were well into their seventies. Neither of them had ever married, nor had they appeared to show any interest in each other. Probably because Gladys was a straightlaced business owner from one of the town’s premier families, and Clive, well, wasn’t any of those things. He was an occasionally employed artist whose claim to fame was that he’d been at Woodstock. A surprise to absolutely no one because he still dressed as if he were livingin that decade.

Not a perfectmatch on paper.

But there it was, the letter/Christmas card from five years ago, and Gladys had let the “s” in her name curl into a little heart. Such a small thing, but it would fire up gossip and speculation if it got out. Which made Emmy wonder why Elise and Gladys had taken such risks.

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