Coming Home For Christmas

He had fallen hard, right then and there.

He had dated plenty of women. He’d been twenty-five, not an innocent, but none of them had been as funny or as smart or as openhearted as Elizabeth Sinclair. Somehow that night while fireworks exploded over the lake, he had tumbled in love with her. To his everlasting astonishment, she had fallen right back.

They had married a year later, after she graduated, and he still remembered the magic of their first months of wedded bliss. They thought they could do anything, could conquer the whole world. She was working as a secretary/receptionist at an insurance office in Shelter Springs while he had continued working construction. Before they married, they had saved up for a down payment on a house and made an offer on the little house on Riverbend Road in need of serious repairs.

Together, they had started fixing up the place, and everything had been exciting and wonderful. For the first time in his life, he felt as if fate had dealt him a pretty good hand. They had even started working toward having a family. Neither of them wanted to wait.

Then her parents had been killed in a tragic boating accident on Lake Haven, her mother falling out of a fishing boat and her father drowning while he tried to rescue her.

Everything had changed.

Elizabeth had gone from happy and loving and generous to lost and grieving and withdrawn in a blink.

She had been dealing with hard things. He understood that. The deaths of her parents had hit her hard, knocking the legs out from under her. The Sinclairs had adored their only daughter and she had loved them back. They had been a warm and loving family, one of the first things that had drawn him to her.

He had tried to support her, to say all the things he thought she needed to hear, to simply hold her when she needed it. None of it had been enough. Instead of turning toward him, she had turned away.

A month after her parents died, she found out she was two months pregnant with Cassie. She had burst into tears when she told him, not happy tears but grief-stricken that she could no longer share the joyous news with her parents, two people she loved so dearly.

Though he knew she tried to be happy about the pregnancy, to compartmentalize her pain over losing her parents and focus instead on the impending birth, he sensed she was only going through the motions. Her smiles had been too bright, her enthusiasm not quite genuine.

He thought the birth of their daughter would jolt her out of the sadness she couldn’t shake. Instead, what he understood now was postpartum depression had hit her hard.

Treatment and therapy had helped, but Elizabeth never quite returned to the woman she’d been the first year of their marriage.

Time would heal, the therapists said, and he held on to that, praying they could find each other again once things returned to normal.

When she told him she wanted to have another baby, he resisted hard, but eventually she had worn him down and convinced him things would be different this time, that it would be the best thing for their marriage.

It hadn’t been. The next two years were hell. This time the postpartum hit with harsh ferocity. After Bridger was born, she had days when she couldn’t get out of bed. She lost weight and lost interest in all the things she usually enjoyed.

They went to round after round of specialists, but none of their therapies seemed to make a difference. By the time she disappeared, when Cassie was almost three and Bridger less than a year, he couldn’t leave her alone with the children. He hired someone to stay with them through the day and took care of them all night.

He had lost his wife long before she actually disappeared.

Anger and misery were a twisted coil in his chest as he drove east through the increasing snow along the Columbia River.

He wanted those early days back, that heady flush of love they had shared, with an ache that bordered on desperation. Right now they didn’t even seem real, like a home movie he had watched of somebody else’s life.

He couldn’t have them back. All he could do now was move forward: clear his name, get the divorce and let her walk away for good this time.

It was what he wanted and what his children needed.

For their sake and his own, he couldn’t let this unexpected attraction he felt for Elizabeth 2.0 get in the way.

Chapter Three

Sleep had become her sanctuary over the past seven years.

Here, in dreams, Elizabeth could escape into the life she ached to recapture. She was free of the pain that had become her constant silent companion, the grinding headaches that could hit out of the blue, the muscle spasms that left her in tears. Especially the terrifying seizures that she had to fight off with every ounce of her strength.

She could be with her family again. Cassie, Bridger. Luke. While she was sleeping, she could become the best version of herself, the mother she had wanted to be. She sat on the floor and played with her children; she held them in her lap and rocked them to sleep; she could read to them for hours on end.

Though she did have the occasional nightmare, for the most part, sleep was just about the best thing in the world, and she loved sliding into her bed in her room by the big windows at Brambleberry House, pulling the soft blankets up around her shoulders and escaping into the heavenly fantasy.

Alas, morning always came. While she might have liked to hibernate, nestled under the covers for months where her mind could live in that joyful fantasy world, her body had pesky physical needs, like food and drink and medication. Plus, she unfortunately had to go outside of the house and work at a job that could provide enough income to pay for those necessities.

The transition was never easy. Her subconscious fought the return to reality, trying to squeeze out as much REM as possible. She always awoke slowly, reluctantly. This time, the journey to consciousness seemed harder than usual.

Her eyes fluttered open. For a few seconds, she couldn’t remember where she was or why she had this vague sense of dread surrounding her. She sensed movement but didn’t know where she was going. It was dark. She was a passenger in a moving vehicle. Outside the darkened windows, she saw the gleam of snow in headlights.

Panic, thick and hard, hit her then, and she suddenly couldn’t breathe. Another night. Another storm. Searing, devastating pain.

Sometimes the idyllic refuge of her dreams could shift to a nightmare in an instant.

A cry escaped her and the sound of her own voice dragged her further to the other side of sleep.

“Easy. It’s okay.”

Odd. What was Luke’s voice doing in her nightmare? It was a discordant, jarring note in the otherwise familiar setting. He hadn’t been there that night. She had left him and their children.

Reality hit her like a fist punching through the windshield. She opened her eyes the rest of the way, turned in her seat and found him through the darkness, hard and unforgiving as he drove through the storm.

“Luke.”

He shifted his eyes briefly from the road. “Were you expecting someone else when you woke up? Hoping you could open your eyes and find out I was just a bad dream?”

He was a good dream. Always the best dream.

“No. Sorry.” She sat up, trying to ignore a wicked cramp in her leg.

“Where are we?”

“About a hundred or so miles past Portland. You slept a few hours. I need to pull off at the next town for gas.”

He was driving slowly through the storm, she could tell by the trees inching past the window. She could see few other cars on the road.

“Something’s wrong,” she said, panic surging again. “There’s no...traffic coming from the other direction.”

“I know.” He kept his gaze focused on the road. Now she noticed his knuckles were white on the steering wheel. Was that from her presence or from the storm? Or both?

“Maybe...maybe it’s an accident or something else has closed the freeway.”

“Maybe.”

“You don’t think so.”

“Don’t know. I’ve been trying to get news on the radio but can’t find any local stations.”

He pointed to a sign on the shoulder indicating an exit two miles ahead with services. “Maybe we can find out more when we fill up.”

A lifetime crawled by in the time it took him to cover those few miles. He drove silently, the only sounds in the vehicle the hum of the heater and the beat of the wipers. By the time he took the exit, she felt wrung dry from the tension. The gas station was part of a cluster of rural houses, maybe six or seven. She was struck by the Christmas lights gleaming a welcome through the snow. Elizabeth had almost forgotten Christmas was only a week away.

Luke drove up to a gas pump, then finally shifted toward her. “Do you need to go in?”

Mostly, she wanted a minute away from him and this tension. If nothing else, moving might help ease the muscle cramp in her leg.

“Yes. I’ll only be...a moment.”

Blowing snow hit her as she opened the vehicle door. She shivered but gripped the door frame and lowered herself out gingerly. For one horrifying moment, she was afraid her leg would not support her weight, but she willed all the strength she had into it and was able to make her painstaking way inside the convenience store.

“Hello,” the clerk greeted her.

Elizabeth forced a smile and made her way straight to the restroom. There, she looked at herself in the mirror, struck as she always was when she looked at her reflection by the woman there who was her but wasn’t her.

When she emerged from the restroom, she found Luke walking through the empty snack aisle with a basket over his arm. He had a deli sandwich, a bag of chips, a couple of protein bars and a banana that looked a few days past its prime.

“Would you like anything?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I’m good.”

“You need to eat. Grab something. This is dinner.”

She wanted to argue that she wasn’t hungry and wasn’t sure she could eat as long as she was with him, but that would simply be foolish. She had to eat to maintain her strength, something she was quite certain she would need over the next few days.

She grabbed a bag of nuts and some dried apple slices. Luke gave her a look and deliberately picked up a second premade sandwich and added it to his collection.

The cashier set down her magazine when they approached the checkout. She was in her sixties, her skin weathered, and she sported red hair in a shade that couldn’t possibly be natural. “Where you folks heading?”

“A town east of Boise. Haven Point.”

She squinted at them. “Haven’t you been listening to the weather report? It’s nasty out there. This storm is hitting hard. They’re telling people to stay off the freeway tonight.”

“It’s never as bad as they say it will be,” Luke said.

“Usually I’d agree with you but this one is a doozy. About an hour east of here, you’re going to be fighting black ice and blizzard conditions. There was a big pileup that’s closed all traffic coming this direction.”

“That’s why we didn’t see anyone,” Elizabeth exclaimed, her stomach muscles clenching.

“We’ll be fine. I’m in a big truck with four-wheel drive.”

“It’s always the guys with four-wheel drive who think they can get through anything and end up off the road,” the cashier said. “That won’t do you diddly if it’s icy. Four-wheel-drive vehicles slide off just as easy as front-wheel.”

“Thanks for the reminder,” Luke said. “But we’ve got to keep going. Family emergency.”

“Well, good luck to you, then,” she said, shaking her head in a pitying sort of way.

Luke paid for their supplies and the gas, and they walked back outside. Just in the short time they’d been inside, the wind had picked up. Now those snowflakes felt like tiny ice-cold missiles, and visibility had dropped to only a few hundred feet.

Elizabeth tried to fight down her panic, remembering another night, another storm.

She did not want to be out in this. She wanted to be safe at home next to her fireplace at Brambleberry House with a mug of hot cocoa and a mystery novel.

Luke was a good driver, she reminded herself as he helped her inside the truck again and she fastened her seat belt. He always had been.

He would keep her safe.

She repeated that mantra for the next half hour, with Luke driving no more than twenty miles per hour. Neither of them said anything, focused only on the increasing fury of the storm.

After what seemed a lifetime, he released a frustrated sigh.

“We’re not going to make it any farther tonight. Might as well catch a few hours of sleep while the storm blows over and then take off again in the morning when the roads are clear. Look online and see if you can find us a couple of rooms in the next town.”

This sparsely populated and remote part of Oregon wasn’t exactly overflowing with towns that boasted four-star hotels. Add in the storm that was basically crippling transportation and she wasn’t optimistic about their chances. Still, she was grateful she still had cell service and something to do to take her mind off the weather conditions and the fear that hovered just on the edge of her mind.

Sure enough, she searched on her phone for hotels in the next town and found only two. When she called, neither had vacancies. Not so much as a broom closet.

She had more luck with the town after that, about ten more miles along the interstate.

“Looks like there’s one room with two beds in a motel in the next town,” she said, looking at the hotel app she used to book her trips to Haven Point.

“Call them and book it. I’m afraid it might take us a half an hour or more to get there and I would hate for it to be sold out when we show up. You can take a credit card out of my wallet.”

He lifted a hip to pull it out, then handed it over, still warm from being in his pocket.

She took it quickly so he could return both hands to the wheel. Using the light from her phone, she opened it and started to search for a credit card. Before she could find one, she stopped on a snapshot inside the wallet, in a little pocket with a clear cover.

Their children.

Cassie and Bridger were hugging each other, faces turned to the camera with matching smiles.

Next to them was another picture. Older. This one was of a much younger Luke with his arm around a woman with blond hair and blue eyes. They looked at each other with a love that was as plain as if hearts and flowers suddenly floated off the image.

She felt as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of the vehicle, as if her lungs couldn’t expand enough to take in the necessary air.

She missed them, this couple who had been so in love. She missed the evenings they would spend snuggled together, sharing secrets and dreams; she missed the pure contentment she felt in his arms; she missed the serenity of knowing someone loved her completely.

She missed that woman, too.

It had been seven years since she’d seen a picture of herself the way she used to be.

She had forgotten. The angle of her nose and the little bump where she had broken it in second grade trying to ice-skate down the slide at the playground. The mouth that looked like the mother she had never forgotten, even during the time she considered the blank years.

Luke looked so young. Not at all like the hard, forbidding man who sat beside her. He had been closed off when they married, his spirit bruised by a cruel, abusive father, yet there had been a softness to him then. A sweetness. She had always attributed that to Megan’s mother, Sharon, his stepmother from the age of about six, who had loved and nurtured the lost little boy he had been.

She fought the urge now to rub her finger on that familiar, beloved face, as if she could absorb him through her skin and somehow resurrect some of that sweetness and joy.

“Well? Did you find a credit card?”

She jerked her gaze from the picture to the man beside her. “Sorry. Just a minute.” She dug out a card and flashed it to him. “Will this work?”

“That’s fine.”

With great reluctance, she closed the wallet on that picture and dialed the number to the hotel, then pushed the required sequence of numbers to connect with an operator.

The line rang at least ten times before a woman answered, sounding flustered.

“Riverside Inn.”

“Hi. I was...wondering about booking a room tonight. We are...traveling and stranded by the storm.”

She hated her hesitant, faltering voice and hated most of all that Luke heard it. So far she had been able to conceal the way her mind tangled sometimes over the right words. At other times, the right ones slipped away completely.

“You and everyone else, honey.”

“Your...your website said you had availability.”

“I’ve got one room left. How long will it take you to make it here?”

“I...don’t know. But I was...hoping I could reserve it with a credit card.”

“That works. Good thing you called. That’s probably the last available room in a hundred miles. Let me open up a reservation.”

After they went through the particulars of booking the room on Luke’s card, Elizabeth thanked the woman.

“I hear it’s ugly out there. Be safe, Mrs. Hamilton.”

No one had called her that in so many years. “I... Thank you.”

She disconnected the call and carefully slid Luke’s credit card back into the pocket of his wallet, fighting the urge to flip through the pictures again and stare at all of them. He probably had more of the children, maybe when they were younger.

“All set?”

She nodded and carefully closed the wallet again. “It was the last room. You were right about booking it over the phone. Here’s your wallet.”

“I can’t put it back in my pocket while I’m driving. Just set it on the console,” he said before turning his attention back to the road and the snow blowing across.

Now that she had nothing to do but focus on the storm, her anxiety increased. Even closing her eyes didn’t keep it at bay because she could still hear the wipers on high and the tires churning through the snowy conditions.

“I don’t know how to get to the motel,” he said as the next exit loomed ahead of them. “Can you find directions?”

Did he sense she could cope better when she had a task? “Of course,” she answered, and punched in the coordinates of the inn to her phone, then recited the turn-by-turn instructions to him. It seemed like forever but was probably only a few more moments before he found the building with the neon sign out front that read Riverside Inn.

He pulled into a parking space, one of the few remaining. “Took a while but we made it. You okay?”

Sure. She was going to be spending the night in a little hotel room with the only man she’d ever loved—a man who happened to hate her with every fiber of his being. Why wouldn’t she be okay?

“Fine,” she answered, quite certain he knew it was a lie.

The hotel’s website hadn’t exaggerated its charm, as websites often did. It was actually quite lovely. Red and green Christmas lights ran along the eaves and a brightly lit Christmas tree twinkled a cheery welcome through the blowing snow.

“You need help getting out?” he asked.

“No. Grab the bags,” she answered.

He nodded and went to the bed of the pickup truck to collect their luggage.

She opened her door and slid down into ankle-deep snow. Sometimes she could be so stupid and stubborn. She should have accepted his help. She could have used her cane but it was back with her suitcase. Stupid her.

The prospect of walking the twenty feet from the pickup truck to the front door of the inn through the snow was as daunting as climbing Mount Hood. Her balance wasn’t the greatest under the best of circumstances. Throw in icy conditions and she seemed predestined for a fall.

Still, she started out after him and had only made it a few faltering steps when he returned without the luggage.

He thrust out his arm. “Here. Grab hold. I should have thought to help you first before taking the bags.”

His words weren’t quite an apology but close to it. She was torn between embarrassment that she needed his help and gratitude that he saw the need and stepped forward so that she didn’t have to ask.

“Sorry. I’m not very...stable on ice.”

In her fleeting glance at his features, she saw questions in his eyes, but his mouth tightened and he remained silent. She turned her attention back to the sidewalk. He had to wonder about her physical condition and the obvious speech issues that were new since she had left him, but he didn’t ask.

Luke dropped her arm as soon as they walked through the outside door into the welcome warmth of the inn’s lobby. She told herself she had no right to be hurt by his obvious unwillingness to touch her, but it still stung.

A half dozen people stood in line, either looking for rooms or waiting to check in.

“I’m sorry but we don’t have anything left,” the flustered clerk was saying to a desperate-looking couple. “I understand an emergency shelter has been set up for stranded travelers at the elementary school, which is two blocks to the east.”

Oh dear. The situation was worse than she’d thought. She wasn’t looking forward to spending the night in a hotel room with Luke, but at least they had a room with beds and wouldn’t have to sleep on a cot in a classroom somewhere.

“Take a seat and I’ll check us in,” Luke said, gesturing to the only open spot in the lobby, next to a very pregnant woman who was trying to entertain a toddler on her lap with her cell phone.

Elizabeth made her way to the seating area, surrounding a river rock fireplace where a gas blaze cheerfully burned.

The woman with the toddler smiled at Elizabeth. “This is crazy, isn’t it? I thought we were taking a simple trip to visit my folks in Boise before the holidays. It’s my dad’s seventy-fifth birthday tomorrow. This blizzard came out of nowhere. When we checked the weather, they said it would only be a few inches, so we thought we were fine.”

Poor thing. Traveling with little ones had to be tough enough without road emergencies. “Do you have a room?” she asked, with some vague, crazy idea of giving her theirs. Elizabeth wouldn’t want to sleep at the elementary school, but it would be better than having to live with the guilt at knowing she sent this pregnant woman and darling little girl back out into that storm.

“We do. We called ahead and were fortunate enough to book one of the last two rooms in town.”

“I think we got the other one.”

The woman smiled at her. “Yay us.” She nodded to the line at the reception desk. “Is that your husband in line behind mine?”

She wanted to say Luke wasn’t her husband, but it seemed foolish to protest. He was, anyway. She just hadn’t been any sort of wife to him for the last seven years.

Instead, she simply nodded.

“Lucky you,” the woman said with a grin. “I’m Lindsey Lowell, and this is my little girl, Aubrey.”

“Hi, Aubrey. Hi, Lindsey. I’m...Sonia Davis.”

She caught a little on the name that had been given to her seven years ago. Even after a few hours, she was already back to being Elizabeth in her head.

“Hi,” Aubrey said. “I’m this many.”

She held up two fingers and Elizabeth smiled. “That’s big. What are you playing?”

“Balloons. I share.” The girl held out the phone for Elizabeth.

“Um. Thanks.” She wasn’t quite sure what to say or do.

“I show you.” Without waiting for permission, Aubrey climbed from her mother’s lap to Elizabeth’s, demonstrating how to pop the balloons on the phone app.

“Aubrey. Honey. Come back.”

“No. It’s fine,” Elizabeth said. She didn’t have the chance to interact with an adorable little girl very often. If nothing else, it would give the pregnant mom a break for a moment.