Page 102 of One Touch

I laughed, and it sounded strange to my ears. I pulled open the door. The frigid air slapped at my cheeks, and I waved my hand toward her. “Just getting my coat!”

“Well, hurry up!” Penny called.

“Pickle,” Wyatt scolded at the same time.

I closed the door and wrapped myself in my thick puffy coat and gloves, then pulled a knit hat over my ears. I wound a thick wool scarf around my neck and braced myself to face the bitter cold. To face my family and pretend everything was fine and I wasn’t thinking about Beckett every second of the day.

I carefully made my way down the steep, rickety steps of the apartment and met Wyatt and his family by his car. He grabbed the bag of presents in my hand, and I piled into the back next to Penny and tried not to feel like a little kid as my brother drove us to the farmhouse.

Penny leaned toward me. “Aunt Katie, what are your thoughts on Santa?”

My eyes met Wyatt’s in the rearview, and the subtle panic in his expression was clear.

“Well,” I said, “I think he’s pretty great.”

“Did you ever consider that he is basically a big jolly burglar who breaks into your house and leaves presents instead of taking your stuff?”

Lark barked a laugh from the front seat as Wyatt grumbled and looked at us in the rearview mirror.

A soft laugh escaped me. “I mean, you’re not wrong.”

“Kind of creepy, right?” she added.

Wyatt glanced back as he drove us toward Aunt Tootie’s house. “Keep calling him creepy, Pickle, and he might skip right over our house.”

My eyes went wide, and I looked toward Penny, whose cute face twisted when she realized there may have been a sliver of truth in her dad’s words.

I leaned in to whisper, “Santa wouldn’t do you like that. Especially not when you’re the coolest kid I know.”

When I winked and her smile bloomed, warmth and affection flowed through me.

Maybe I wasn’t so dead after all.

The car pulled down Tootie’s driveway, and a fresh stab of pain pinched under my ribs as her home came into view. The farmhouse stood proudly against the fresh white snow. The boys had come with their ladders and trimmed it out with white Christmas lights that twinkled against the dark winter sky. On each of the tall wooden columns of the wraparound porch, Tootie had hung huge festive bows. The home looked like it had been plucked right out of a holiday magazine.

We did that.

Lark turned from the front seat and looked at me with soft, kind eyes. “Ready for this?”

I swallowed hard and faked a smile. “You bet.”

At dinner, I sat at one end of the large oak table, surrounded by my family, trying to focus on the delicious food in front of me. Christmas had always been my favorite holiday, but this year was different.

It had been weeks since I’d seen Beckett, and though we had exchanged a few texts, the distance between us seemed to stretch on, just as I feared it would.

My mind raced back to the night after their fight at the Grudge, when I had pushed too hard and asked if he loved me.

I didn’t regret that. He needed to know how I felt, and I needed to hear it from his mouth.

Only he didn’t. He couldn’t. It was the exact moment I knew we each had to work on ourselves if we ever had a chance at true happiness together.

I pressed my eyes shut and sent up a silent prayer that he was putting in the work, too, and that all this would be a temporary blip.

As my family passed dinner dishes around the table, my mind wandered to Beckett’s Christmas.

I wondered what he was doing, where he was, and whether he was thinking about me too.

My brother Lee tipped his chin toward Duke as he plopped a heap of sweet potatoes on his plate. “I saw the Miller place finally sold.” His eyes softened when he looked toward me, as if to apologize for even bringing it up.

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