The Winter Berry House

by Caroline Flynn

  It was a tradition, after all, and Kait found solace in knowing Addie had gotten a chance to meet the twins.

  Christmas was busier now, with two little boys scurrying around and creating havoc with wide eyes and high-pitched giggles, but all in all, it was still tame. Christmas Eve was met with two bleary-eyed sisters staying up to wrap gifts from themselves and from Santa, and Christmas morning brought toys and games for the twins that she and Janna saved for months for, drinking warm coffee and cookies from sunrise till dark.

  It had always been a fun and pleasant time of year for Kait, creating memories she would hold on to until she was old and gray.

  This Christmas was different, though. There had been so many ups and downs that she didn’t know if she should be thankful for it or try to request a do-over from Santa Claus himself.

  This Christmas had started as it normally did, with the lighthearted feelings and the antsy urge to decorate every room and surface she came near. With the sound of Christmas songs floating through her mind even when they weren’t playing, and the excitement as she dreamed about the fun things she would purchase as gifts and the decadent treats she would bake. Now, the morning before the big reveal of Addie’s tribute dinner Kait had so painstakingly planned with Branch, she yearned to be under the covers in her bed, warm and comfortable as she hid from the world and all the sadness that came with it. There wasn’t a thing that was jolly or festive about this time of year to her, now. Maybe her Christmas spirit was broken.

  Just like her heart.

  She wished she hadn’t been so proactive and switched her diner shifts with Eve for today and tomorrow. She wished Eve hadn’t been so willing to work so she could prepare for the Christmas Eve dinner alongside Branch, a knowing smirk on her face the entire time as she nodded, scratching out Kait’s name on the schedule and replacing it with her own.

  She wished she could go back in time and do it all again. How far would she go? There was a certain appeal to retreating to the beginning of the month and handling everything differently. She could have pointed to the door when Branch walked into the diner that day, telling him he wasn’t welcome there, that she had nothing to say to him, didn’t want to see him, and would never forgive him for his lies and betrayal. A few simple, sharp-tongued words would have changed the course of events between then and now.

  But perhaps the answer was to rewind the hands of time further, going back to her teenage years when she was so impressionable and willing to believe in all the things that he promised. Willing to believe in love. If Kait went that far back, she could turn away from him when she saw him in the hallways of their high school, ignore his soft-spoken voice and his alluring espresso eyes. She could have kept her distance, and managed to keep her heart safe from the likes of Branch Sterling.

  Even as Kait thought about all the what ifs and might-have-beens, she knew things would never have been able to change the trajectory of their love. She would have fallen for him in any scenario she could conjure up. She would have welcomed him back into their hometown, and into her heart, regardless of his past indiscretions.

  Because she loved him. No number of years could change that. And feeling something – even the pain that accompanied their brand of unconditional love – was better than feeling nothing at all.

  At least, Kait had thought so. The numbness that crept in under her skin and anesthetized her wasn’t exactly a welcomed feeling, either, especially considering the cheery mood she was supposed to be buoyantly displaying during the holiday season, but it was better than the bouts of excruciating sadness that overtook her, coming on with the tiniest reminder of Branch and the lies that came with him, and only abating once her tears ran dry. It was a vicious cycle, feeling nothing and then being consumed by every emotion all at once. As much as Kait wished she had her diner shifts to occupy her body, she knew that not even physical labor and overwhelming crowds would occupy her mind. She was better off at home, where she could wallow in her own sadness without having to put on a brave face and pretend she was fine.

  Because she wasn’t fine. She didn’t know if she ever would be again. Buried amidst her heartache, she had so many questions. Not only for Branch, but for Zach. For herself.

  Maybe she always had.

  Because the more she thought about it, something didn’t add up.

  Maybe it never did.

  There were so many maybes whirling around in her brain, Kait couldn’t think straight. She was beginning to struggle to remember which parts of her memories were real and which parts were what she had told herself to get through it. Or which parts she took at face value when she should have delved deeper and demanded answers.

  But that was the thing, wasn’t it? Even back then, all those years ago, Zach had an answer for everything. No wonder he was such a successful businessman. He went after what he wanted, and he wasn’t afraid to ask the tough questions or give the hard answers. Had those hard answers been the truthful ones?

  Guilt swarmed her. She was doubting Zach, after everything he had been through. Everything they had been through.

  Janna was, too, though, and Kait’s older sister didn’t fully trust anyone. She might have been on the sidelines of this situation, but Janna had watched it unfold through a spectator’s eyes, not completely objective but definitely less subjective than Kait was. She had picked up on the discrepancy immediately. Why hadn’t Zach mentioned his two previous meetings with Branch before slapping that contract down in front of her as proof? She had been so caught up in the who that the why hadn’t managed to even make it on to her radar.

  And that could have been exactly what Zach was banking on.

  Goodness, she sounded like a conspiracy theorist. If only she had been rational enough to demand answers from Branch outside the diner instead of losing her cool in the heat of the moment.

  Déjà vu was creeping in. Kait had already lived through a similar situation once before, and look where that had gotten her. Standing still, afraid to do anything that might move her own life forward or change things in any way, and afraid to say things in fear of rocking the boat, keeping her mouth shut and her head down, to keep herself protected from the outside world. In retrospect, all she had done was put off the inevitable. She knew that now. Back then, she might have screamed at Branch to leave, out of sight but definitely not out of mind, but more than a decade later, all those unspoken questions still needed answering and all that love she had locked away had come pouring out at the first sight of him.

  Kait needed to find out what was really going on. Her head wasn’t in the sand anymore, and she wasn’t hiding from the truth. She couldn’t. This time, there was a time limit; Branch would leave Port Landon by the end of the month, and the answers she so desperately needed would be gone with him.

  She showered quickly and dressed, tossing her wet hair up in a messy knot despite the icy chill outside. Janna would turn into Mom-zilla if she saw her head outside like that, but the furthest thing from Kait’s mind right now was whether or not she might catch a cold.

  Shuffling into her thick jacket, her stomach churned violently. Her gut instincts were rarely wrong, but she had a funny feeling that she had been ignoring those instincts for a long, long time. Now, she wasn’t turning away from that churning sensation. It proved to her that something was wrong, and that she was right to face it.

  No makeup, eyes puffy from her tears, Kait reached for her purse and shoved her feet into her shoes. She should have been over at Addie’s house, working alongside Branch to prepare for all the festivities tonight would bring in that household. Instead, she was heading out into the cold to hunt down the truth, something she should have done a long time ago.

  She swung the door open, prepared for the blast of frigid air to wrap itself around her, pinching at her bare cheeks and making her eyes water. What she wasn’t prepared for was the man standing in the middle of the front step, hand raised to knock. She barrelled into him, gasping as her mind struggled to catch up with he
r physical surroundings.

  ‘Oh!’ She let out a strangled sound of surprise, her mitten-clad hands dropping her purse onto the snow-covered concrete as she tried to push herself away from his chest. ‘Oh, I’m sorry—’ Her brain finally registered his presence. ‘Zach?’

  ‘Hey, Kait.’ He greeted her with a small smile that didn’t reach his eyes. ‘Let’s go inside, if that’s okay. I think we need to talk.’

  The way he said it, the way his eyes betrayed him, she knew then that it wasn’t okay. Things might never be okay again. But that was the price of the truth, and she had a sinking suspicion they were both about to pay dearly for it.

  Chapter 22

  Branch

  Branch didn’t know what he had been thinking.

  As he spent the entire morning recleaning the main floor of his grandparents’ home after Googling how to cook a turkey – it took just as much time for him to find the roast pan and turkey baster as it did for him to run through all the steps listed on the cooking website he found, and he still hadn’t figured out exactly what the baster was for – he finally decided he had been crazy to ever think he could pull this off on his own. Trying to walk a foot in Grandma Addie’s shoes was impossible, let alone attempting a full mile. He didn’t know why he ever thought he could do it in the first place.

  Scratch that. Branch knew exactly what he had been thinking, and he remembered why he’d been so confident he could pull it off.

  Kait.

  The woman had the ability to make him feel like he could do anything. Like it was possible for them to pull off the biggest, greatest, most festive dinner Christmas Eve had ever witnessed, bringing Port Landon together and reminding them of all the good Branch was capable of, not just his mistakes. She made him feel like this event mattered more than anything else in the world. Like he mattered.

  And now he didn’t even know if he was going to be able to make it happen.

  Considering the circumstances, he didn’t blame her for not showing up. She had the next three days off; she had said so numerous times over the past couple weeks, excitement gleaming from her seafoam eyes as she advised him that she didn’t remember the last time she had that many days off in a row. She was home, on Christmas Eve.

  And being anywhere in the vicinity of Branch had gone from the top of her list to the very bottom. Or, maybe he had been erased from the list completely.

  This wasn’t at all how he envisioned this day would go. What was supposed to be a fun-filled day of seeing all their plans and holiday wishes come to fruition together was now one hour that stretched into the next, alone, fumbling through the things he did know how to do and struggling to quickly learn the things he didn’t.

  He could only imagine what Grandma Addie would be saying to him right about now.

  The day was a certifiable recipe for disaster in the making. Which seemed to be the only recipe he could successfully handle at the moment. The ingredients were all on the countertop, somewhere, for Grandma Addie’s bread pudding, but Branch didn’t know a thing about making good bread pudding. Kait had planned to tackle that dessert, with him as her wingman if needed.

  He swallowed, reminding himself that she didn’t need him anymore. For anything.

  He had been a fool to rely on Zach to go to Kait and tell her the truth. What did it matter to him if she still believed Branch was a conniving liar with no conscience? The reality was that, if Zach wanted to, all he needed to do was keep his mouth shut and he would get exactly what he always wanted – Kait would continue to hate Branch more than ever, and she would continue her friendship with Zach like nothing had ever happened.

  Like Branch had never been there at all.

  Except, that wasn’t enough for Zach. It never had been. He loved Kait, and Branch would never blame him for that. Frankly, he didn’t understand how the whole world wasn’t in love with her. But the man had gone about it the wrong way, trying to remove Branch from the picture by dishonorable means and hoping to make Kait love him back by … what, exactly? Process of elimination? Branch would never understand his reasoning, or the fact that he thought it might actually work.

  But Branch was betting everything he had, including his own heart, on the flicker of uncertainty in Zach’s eyes. He had ended up seriously injured the last time he’d tried to force fate to work in his favor, and then spent the following years without Branch around to meddle in his relationship with Kait. It still hadn’t been enough. He and Kait were still friends, but friends only. Everything he had gone through during the accident and afterward, including what sounded like a one-sided romantic relationship, had been in vain in his eyes. Zach and Kait were still friends, and friends they would remain.

  Then, Branch had shown back up in town like the ghost of Christmas past, only to pick up where he and Kait had left off, effortlessly. Even Branch realized that it must have been a vicious slap in Zach’s face.

  He got it, he really did. Branch was furious with the man for the lies he told and the underhanded things he had done, to Kait and to himself, but he understood, in a messed-up kind of way. Love made people do crazy things, rash things. As he glanced around the kitchen, unsure what to do next, he reminded himself that he and Zach were no different in that regard.

  All he could do was hope that Zach followed through on his word. There was nothing more Branch could say or do, save for getting a grip on his concentration and doing what he said he would, too – host a true Addie-like Christmas Eve here, tonight.

  He had a lot of work to do.

  Disgruntled by the amount of food he didn’t know how to make, he went about working on something he did to boost his morale a bit. He pulled the different kinds of cheeses from the fridge, found the assortment of pickle jars on the countertop, then went in search of Grandma Addie’s crystal-cut platters. He found the three small ones he’d been looking for underneath the antique hutch in the dining room, and piled one on top of the other. Rising from his crouched position, eager to feel like he accomplished something, he turned with a renewed determination. Whether it was his lack of grace or the unsteadiness of the tower of glass in his hands, the top platter slid between his fingers. In painstaking slow motion, Branch watched, horrified, as the glass glinted in the incandescent light of the chandelier above the dining room table as it somersaulted in mid-air, then crashed to the floor, shards and pieces scattering wildly across the hardwood floor.

  ‘No!’

  It was too late. He stood there, eyes wide and heart pounding, as the glass glittered like icy frost in the streams of sunshine stretching across the floorboards. Gripping the remaining two platters so tightly that his knuckles turned white, Branch couldn’t tell if he couldn’t breathe, or if he was getting too much oxygen from the heavy panting he couldn’t seem to control.

  Motionless, he let a new, unabashed wave of grief consume him. It was just a platter. But as his throat grew thick with pent-up emotion, he knew it wasn’t. It was Grandma Addie’s platter. A piece of his history. A sliver of the memories he had left of her that was now shattered. That was now gone forever.

  Like Grandma Addie and Grandpa Duke. Like Kaitie.

  He blew out a long breath, hearing the quiver of it as he released it. In unbearably slow movements, he set the remaining platters on the dining room table and stepped away from the mess. The distance helped to slow the thump in his chest a bit, but it did little to fill the void the broken crystal had managed to rip open inside him.

  Tears burned his eyelids as he turned away from the shattered glass that mirrored his heart so well, and Branch found himself drawn to the Christmas tree in the front window. The first thing he had done that morning when he woke up was plug it in, counting on the twinkling lights and shiny tinsel to cheer him up and keep him forging on. So far, it hadn’t worked as well as he had hoped.

  He approached the tree with caution, reaching out to let his fingertips touch first one sparkly ornament, then another, blinking rapidly as he attempted to keep his tears at bay. He c
ouldn’t cry over this. He refused to. If Grandma Addie were here, she would remind him that a glass plate was nothing to shed tears for.

  It was more than the broken platter, though. It was the loss he felt in this big old house, the constant reminders that the two people who loved him like a son were gone and that all he had left were things—ridiculous, menial, tangible things that surrounded him and weren’t ridiculous or menial at all. If they were, he wouldn’t be two seconds away from crying his eyes out over a cheese platter his grandmother had last touched.

  He sniffed, shaking his head to free himself of the emotional wave threatening to engulf him completely. Squeezing his eyes shut, he took a deep breath in and let it out slowly. Upon opening his eyes again, his gaze landed on the ornament pressed into his palm, a tiny glass teddy bear with a cardinal nestled in its paws.

  Cardinals are supposedly messengers from heaven. They show up when you need them most.

  Branch heard Kait’s voice as clearly as if she were standing there with him. Fingers enclosing around it, he let his eyes close again, focusing on the warmth of the glass in his hand and the vivid image of his grandmother that was never far from the forefront of his mind.

  ‘I can’t do this without you, Grandma Addie,’ he whispered painfully. ‘I can’t do this alone.’

  It crushed him to admit it, knowing there was no way he was going to be able to pull a Christmas Eve dinner off the way his grandmother had done for so many years, so effortlessly. But he couldn’t, and in that moment, he grieved his inabilities almost as much as his loss and loneliness.

  He opened his eyes slowly, letting the light of day back in and the silence of the house take over once again.