of inadequacy she had grown up with, the secondhand clothes, the Christmases with no trees, her mother’s rather careless attitude toward her only child.
Emma had grown up feeling as if she was a mistake, and she shared how it had made her want desperately to do something good enough to be recognized, how, finally, it had made her vulnerable to a false love.
She told him about her failed engagement, her last disastrous Christmas.
“So, there I was, so excited I was wriggling like a puppy as we arrived at Peter’s parents’ house for Christmas day,” she admitted. “I hadn’t met them before, and it felt as if I had passed some huge test that I’d been invited for Christmas.
“Honestly, the house was everything I could have hoped for. It was like something off a Christmas card—a long driveway, snow-covered trees decorated in tiny white lights. The house was sparkling with more tiny white lights. Inside was like something out of my best dream of Christmas—poinsettias on every surface, real holly garlands, a floor-to-ceiling Christmas tree, so many parcels underneath it that they filled half the room.
“Everything looked so right,” she remembered sadly, “and felt so wrong. As soon as Peter opened the car door for me there were instructions on what to say and how to say it. Don’t tell them I got the dress on sale. Don’t ask for recipes. Don’t ooh and aah over the house as if I was a hick from the country.
“His parents were stuffy. His mother asked me questions about what schools I’d gone to and fished for information about my family. His father didn’t even acknowledge it was Christmas and barely seemed to know I was there. He kept leaving the room to check the channel on the television that runs all the up-to-the-minute stock information.
“We opened gifts before dinner. It was awful. Robotic. These people had everything, what did they care about more? His mother looked aghast at the brooch I’d gotten her, his father was indifferent to the cigars Peter had recommended I get him, Peter hardly glanced at the electronic picture frame I’d filled with pictures of us.
“And then there were their gifts to me. Peter got me a diamond bracelet. He called it a tennis bracelet, as if anyone would play tennis in something like that! When I saw it, I felt crushed, as if he didn’t know me at all. I never wear jewelry, had told him I didn’t care for it. I got a very expensive designer bag from his mother and father. Nobody had put any thought into anything. It was like an obligation they’d fulfilled.
“And the worst was yet to come. Dinner. Served by a poor maid, and prepared by a cook. Naturally, I earned the look from Peter when I asked why they were working Christmas day. Then, his mother announced, casually, slyly, that Monique had been calling all day hoping to speak to Peter.
“I knew that was his old girlfriend. I’d worked in his office while he was going out with her. She was everything I wasn’t. She’d ditched him to go to France.
“And he didn’t even try to hide how excited he was that she was back.
“Naturally, when I called him on his excitement later that evening, I was being unsophisticated. I was the hick. He could have friends other than me!
“Maybe it was the pleasure he took in calling me a hick that made going home to my grandmother so irresistible.”
“I think you just wanted to get away from him,” Ryder deduced, not trying to hide his irritation with Peter. “He would have killed you quietly, one put-down at time. Why did you accept that as long as you did?”
She smiled sadly. “Ah. The great put-down. That’s all I’ve ever known.”
And he vowed right then and there that for as long as their time together lasted, put-downs would never be part of the way he communicated with her. He wanted to snatch back every careless word he had said about her dreams and the inn, but instead, he took her hand, kissed the top of it, a gentleman acknowledging a complete lady. “Their loss,” he said quietly.
And the way the sun came out in her eyes made him kiss her hand again.
There was no shortage of work while the road remained closed, and the hard work was as amazing an antidote to his pain as Emma. Until the road reopened and the power came on there was more work to do every day than ten men could have handled. It was back-breaking, hand-blistering work, and it was just what he needed. It was what he had tried to achieve with punishing workouts at the gym and never quite succeeded. Not like this. Exhaustion.
Utter and complete.
He crawled onto that mattress at night and slept as he had not slept since the fire.
To add to that, he had a sense of belonging that he had not had since the death of his brother and then his sister-in-law had ripped his own family apart.
Tim, Mona, the girls formed an old-fashioned family unit, their love fluid rather than rigid, the circle of it opening easily to include Ryder and Tess, just as once it must have opened to take in Emma. It was a plain kind of love: not flowers and chocolates, not fancy Christmas gifts, or dramatic declarations.
It was the kind of love where people worked hard toward a common goal, then ate together, laughed over simple board games. It was a love that toted a demanding baby with it everywhere it went, as though there was nothing but joy in that task.
What had really happened when he had told Emma he was broken beyond healing?
It was as if the healing had begun right then.
It was as if he had given Emma permission to love him in a different way—one that did not involve kisses—and that love—steady, compassionate, accepting—was stronger than the kisses could have been. Building a foundation for something else.
But what? Maybe it was as simple as building the foundation for one perfect day.
Was there such a thing as a perfect day?
People thought there was. They tried to find those days on beaches in tropical countries in the winter. They tried to have them on the day they got married. They tried to create that day on Christmas in particular.
Who would ever have thought a perfect day looked like the one he had had on the second day after the storm? By late afternoon, all of them, Mona, the girls, Emma and Ryder had cleared a ton of broken limbs off the pond, Tim pushing it to them with his tractor shovel, clearing snow in preparation for skating. Tess shouted orders from the little sled they all took turns pulling her in.
An army emergency team arrived on snowmobiles to let them know they were close to having power restored, and the roads would be reopened within twenty-four hours.
Ryder did not miss the stricken look on Emma’s face and her quick glance toward him, but he understood perfectly what she felt.
They had built a world here separate from the world out there and their own realities. They had built a family of sorts, one filled with the things people wanted from family and that he suspected Emma had never had: a sense of safety and acceptance.
But when the roads opened and the power was restored, they were all, in their own ways, moving on, leaving this place that necessity had created. The sense of belonging and of meaning was going to be hard to leave.
Especially since Ryder had no idea if he was taking this new sense of peace with him or leaving it here.
“Enough,”
