Page 111 of Daddy's Little Christmas

I closed my eyes. “Yeah. I did.” I expelled a breath. “I do.”

“And you didn’t ask because you were trying to protect him?”

“And maybe myself,” I whispered. “He made me feel… young again. Hopeful. Like there was something in my life I hadn’t already spent years building. Something new. Something I didn’t know I needed.”

Tom reached over and rested a hand on my shoulder.

“Graeme,” he said, voice gentle, “you let Michael go without asking him to stay. I watched you do it. You said you didn’t want to clip his wings.”

My jaw tightened.

“But sometimes,” he continued, “when you don’t ask someone to stay… they go. Not because they want to. But because they don’t think they’re allowed to stay.” A beat. “Maybe Rudy needed you to ask.”

“He’s thirty,” I said. “He deserves someone his own age. Someone who can run after him without wheezing.”

Tom snorted. “Please. The man melted every time you looked at him.” And then he eyed me clinically from head to toe. “And for what it’s worth, you’re as fit as a fiddle.”

I huffed a broken laugh. “Maybe.”

“No maybe,” Tom said. “Rudy didn’t leave because he didn’t want you. “He left because wanting you meant imagining a future—and that’s hard when you’ve learned not to count on them.”

The words hit so deep, I had to take a seat.

The room felt too warm. Too bright. Too quiet. Grief pressed at my ribs like something trying to climb out.

“I don’t know how to do this again,” I said. “Open up. Risk it. I thought that part of my life was behind me.”

Tom’s expression softened. “Maybe it’s just been waiting for the right person.”

My vision blurred. I swiped a hand across my eyes, frustrated when it came away wet.

Tom stood and squeezed my shoulder before moving toward the door. “We’ll be around if you need anything.”

“Thanks.”

He opened the door halfway, then turned. “Graeme?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t close up your heart. Just… don’t.”

Then he left.

I remained at the table, Rudy’s note resting between my hands, reading it once more, then again—not because the words changed, but becauseI did. Because each pass loosened something different.

Sometime after that, I stood, fed the fire, rinsed a mug I hadn’t finished. I didn’t track the minutes.

By late morning, the light had shifted from pale gray to something sharper and white—the kind that made the snow glare and the cold feel deliberate.

I picked up my phone.

Rudy’s name stared back at me from the screen.

I held it there longer than necessary, thumb suspended, Tom’s words looping in my head.

Sometimes when you don’t ask someone to stay… they go.

Maybe my sweet boy wanted to stay.