Chapter 1: Last Christmas Apart
The bow came loose in my hand, and the little box fell open on the kitchen island.
I wasn’t snooping. I want that on the record. That morning Ryan had set a shopping bag on the counter and said, “Babe, you’re so much better at this than me. Client gifts. Can you wrap them before I leave Thursday?” And I said yes, because for eleven years I’d been the one who was better at this.
Four boxes. A bottle of bourbon for a surgeon in Dayton. A leather portfolio for his regional director. Two candles for the front desk at a clinic in Cincinnati.
And a small dove-gray box from a jeweler on High Street, already tied with a satin ribbon that wasn’t tied tight enough.
Inside, on a bed of velvet, lay a thin gold necklace with a tiny round pendant. Real gold. Not a front-desk candle.
Tucked under the velvet was a card in Ryan’s handwriting, the same slanted capitals he uses on grocery lists.
Lila. This is the last Christmas we spend apart. Love, R.
From the den, I could hear him on a work call, laughing that big easy laugh that sells knee implants to orthopedic surgeons in four states. “No, no, the twenty-third’s perfect. I’ll be wheels-up by noon.”
I read the card again. My hands didn’t shake. That surprised me later. In the moment, all I noticed was the dishwasher humming, and the rosemary candle I’d lit at four o’clock burning unevenly, and how a card the size of a playing card could weigh nothing at all.
Lila.
I didn’t know a Lila. I knew a Lisa at his office, who sends us a fruit basket every December. I knew his mother, his sister, the three women who cut his hair in rotation. I’d met everyone in Ryan’s life, or I thought I had, because that’s what eleven years is supposed to mean.
“Nat?” His footsteps in the hall. “You get the Dayton one done?”
I closed the velvet. I set the card back underneath it, exactly where it had been. I retied the satin ribbon tighter than he had, and I slid the box into the bag behind the bourbon.
He came around the corner in his gray henley and his navy vest, phone in hand, smelling like the cedar soap I buy him in bulk. He kissed the top of my head.
“You’re a lifesaver,” he said.
“I know.”
He picked up the roll of red paper and put it down again, the way he does when he has something to say that he’s already decided is fine. “So. Bad news, good news.”
“Okay.”
“Bad news, I can’t drive up to your parents’ with you on the twenty-second. That Dallas account wants a sit-down on the twenty-third, and I can’t say no to Dallas. Good news, I’ll fly into Traverse City Christmas morning. Rent a car, be at the farm by eleven.” He grinned. “Tell your mom to save me a plate.”
Last year, he’d missed Christmas Eve for “Phoenix.” The year before, it was “a vendor dinner in Louisville” that ran so late he slept at a hotel.
I thought about the card. The last Christmas we spend apart.
Apart from whom, Ryan?
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll save you something.”
He laughed, because it sounded like a joke, and went back to the den, and I stood in my kitchen with a roll of tape in one hand and the oddest feeling of calm, like the whole house had gone underwater and I was the only one who’d noticed I could breathe.
I finished wrapping the bourbon. I finished the portfolio. I wrote Merry Christmas from Ryan and Natalie Brooks on every tag, the way I had for eleven years.
Then I went upstairs, sat on the edge of our bed, and opened the gym bag he’d left by the closet for Thursday’s trip.
I don’t know what I was looking for.
I only knew I wasn’t done.
