Page 2 of Daddy's Little Christmas

Heat sprang behind my eyes. For a moment, everything else in the room dimmed—the clinking glasses, the murmur of other conversations, the low piano music.

Three years together.

Three years of schedules and campaigns and family holidays where I’d worn the right shirt and smiled at the right aunts and shaken hands with the right party donors.

Three years of not letting myself hope too loudly.

And now… this.

But Nate’s eyes didn’t shine. His jaw stayed tight. No nerves or wonder, nooh God, please say yes.

Just calm. Controlled. Prepared.

“I want us to build a life together that’s stable,” he said. “Mature. Respectable. Something that reflects well on both of us—and on the people who put their trust in me.”

On the voters, he meant.

On the party.

On the image.

The candle between us flickered.

“I think you know,” he continued, “there are certain behaviors that aren’t compatible with that.”

My throat tightened.

There it was.

He didn’t say the word. He never used it. But I heard it anyway.

Regression.

My mind flashed, uninvited, to the one night, two years ago, when everything had cracked open.

The night Mrs. Davis died was still carved into me.

She’d taken me in when I was twelve—after too many temporary homes, too many houses where I felt like furniture instead of family. She and Mr. Davis had been the first people who looked at me like I was wanted. When Mr. Davis passed away a few years later, she kept me with her without a second thought. Even after I left for college, even after I built a life on my own, we never stopped being close.

Three months ago, she slipped on a rug in her kitchen, hit her head, and… died.

I held it together through the phone call from the hospital. Through arranging her service because there was no one else to do it. Through standing by her graveside with a small handful of friends who’d loved her, too.

It wasn’t until I went back to her house alone—to pack up the things she’d asked me to take someday—that it hit me.

Her favorite mug was still beside the sink.

Her crossword book was still open on the table.

The cardigan she wore every morning was still draped over the arm of her chair.

Seeing those pieces of her life, untouched and waiting… that was the moment something inside me cracked wide open.

I’d gone quiet. Smaller. Curled up on the living room rug with a blanket and one of the stupid stuffed bears she bought me as a teenager “because you never really got to be a kid, sweetheart,” and I’d just… stayed there. Soft-voiced. Needing someone.

Needing him.

Nate had come over, taken one look at me, and gone rigid.