by Maisey Yates
He had been there when Amelia was born. He’d watched Ellie labor to bring her into the world, and he’d seen her take her first breath. There wasn’t another kid on the face of the earth he was more connected to than her.
But he wasn’t her father.
And he had never even let himself wish that he was. But something was happening to him now, something related probably to the change in his relationship with Ellie, and it made his chest feel scraped raw inside.
It made him wish he could sit right alongside them, complete the picture. Make a family.
That was messed up. It was all messed up.
Amelia wasn’t his. She was Clint’s.
That was how it had to be. That was how it was.
He was backup, and he was pretty damned good at that. But there would be a man who married Ellie someday, and he wouldn’t be backup. He would be the real deal. And it would be up to Caleb to make sure that Amelia didn’t forget who her father had been.
He told her a lot of stories about Clint, from the time she was too young to remember, when they were driving between the ranch and her home. She liked to hear the stories, and he was never sure if she fully realized that the man they were talking about was her dad, or if he had become something of a favorite storybook character to her. But either way, she had some sense of who he was, and that was important to him.
He knew it mattered to Ellie, too. And it was just another thing that he had taken to making sure he did.
Right. Except all this other stuff. It getting all tangled up. And you wishing that you could step right into that empty space that he left. For what reason? To be standing next to her, but not as good as she had? To be basically half the dad that he would’ve been?
He gritted his teeth and pushed that thought away and turned his focus to the lot.
The president of the Gold Valley Rotary was giving a speech, but the words were muffled at the distance they were down the street, and he went ahead and ignored it while he and the boys organized cash drawers, little electronic squares to swipe cards—which he had been informed by Jehoshaphat was the best way to make money, since nobody carried the real stuff anymore—and counted up trees, just to make some busywork.
But Amelia was right, and while the parade was running, they didn’t really get any business, so Caleb made his way over to where Ellie and Amelia were sitting and plopped down on the edge of the curb. Amelia smiled at him, got out of the chair and joined him down on the ground.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Sitting with you,” she said like he was the most ridiculous human being on the planet.
“But the ground is hard,” he said.
She shrugged. “It’s not bad.”
She rested her chin in her hands, her fingertips dimpling her cheeks as she turned her attention to the parade route with the kind of intense seriousness only a child could give to anything.
The Girl Scout troop was first, all dressed as cookies, carrying banners and handing out candy. Amelia rushed forward and took a piece from one of the adorable cookies, before rushing back.
“Do you want to be a Girl Scout?” Ellie asked.
Amelia frowned. “No. Because then you have to give candy away. I just want to get candy.”
Caleb’s head fell back and he laughed. “You’re smart,” he said.
“I am,” Amelia agreed, unwrapping her candy happily.
He couldn’t help but grin because the pure honesty in that kid was something else. Something he wished like hell a person could keep through adulthood. Before what you should do became bigger than what you wanted.
Oh, to have that simplicity.
If Ellie could have been the piece of candy he’d wanted.
Sorry you got there first, buddy. But she’s mine and I want her.
But Ellie hadn’t been candy. And Caleb and Clint hadn’t been kids.
Ellie had been Clint’s wife. And so Caleb had...done what a decent man needed to do. Not what a kid who wanted something sweet might do.
He pushed that out of his mind and tried to focus on the moment, on the parade.
Amelia got up and danced with the intertribal dance group that went by next, and then kept on dancing through the Scottish Heritage Society and their bagpipes.
Then she sat down, this time settling herself on Caleb’s knee, leaning her head back against his shoulder for the rest of the event.
He took a breath, trying to get in air around all the sharp feelings in his lungs. He looked over at Ellie, who was watching them with a sad and wistful expression on her face.
He cleared his throat and looked back at the parade, watching as the fire trucks went by, which seemed to enliven Amelia again.
By the time it was finished, she seemed tired and hungry.
“Want me to take her down to Mustard Seed to get her something to eat?” Caleb asked.
“Your mom is coming to pick her up.” Ellie looked down at her phone. “She’ll be here soon.”
“You don’t have to stay,” he said.
“Well,” she said. “The boys are kind of my responsibility.”
They looked over at the boys, who were currently standing like posts at the front of the lot, like they were ready to beat anyone up who came near the cash box.
“They’re taking it pretty seriously. I think they’ll be fine. Anyway, I’m paying them, so they have incentive.”
“Are you trying to get rid of me?”
His heart kicked. “No,” he said. “I’m never trying to get rid of you.”
“Well, then, let me arrange it how I want.”
They were both stubborn. A little bit too stubborn for their own good.
He thought again about what she had said. About Clint, and how he made her a more relaxed person. About how he made her someone lighter. And he wasn’t entirely sure they did that for each other.
Because he didn’t have that kind of laid-back attitude, where he shrugged things off and chuckled about it.
No, he and Ellie seemed to just go toe-to-toe, neither one of them knowing when to back down, even on things that didn’t really matter. He wasn’t trying to get rid of her; he was just trying to make sure she knew that she didn’t have to stay.
His mom showed up about a minute later, gave him a hug and left the imprint of her pink lips on his cheek and the scent of her perfume lingering on his jacket collar. But it was his mom, so he was going to be a man about it and not complain.
Then she took Amelia by the hand. “I’m going to take her to Sugar Cup. Is it okay if she gets a treat?” Tammy asked.
“Sure,” Ellie said, smiling. “Have fun.”
“You know,” Ellie said. “If it weren’t for your mom...she wouldn’t have any experience of a grandmother at all. And your dad is even sweet to her. They really are her grandparents, Caleb.”
For some reason that made him feel...not so great. Because somehow it reminded him of how all those pieces seemed to fit together and didn’t much require him. The way that Clint had been like a son to his parents, the way that Hank had admired him. And he understood why. And it seemed... It seemed so pointless and terrible to be worried about it now. But it was all well and good for Tammy and Hank to be surrogate grandparents, but he could never be a...
You don’t even want to be a father. And you wouldn’t be a good one anyway.
Not as good as what she should have had.
He shoved that away, and just in time, because the first wave of people began to arrive now that the parade was through. That kept them busy, showing people through the lot, chatting, which was mainly Ellie’s domain—and helping carry trees to vehicles.
They went on until darkness started to fall, at around 5:00 p.m., now that winter was settling in.
They plugged in the lights that were strung around the tree lot, and sudd
enly, the space was transformed.
The whole town was.
He looked around, at the white lights that lined the red brick all down Main Street, the way the pine boughs were illuminated by the glow. Like an Old West fairy tale, all lit up bright. The night overhead was clear, the sky an inky velvet-black, the stars glittering like crystal.
If he was a man who believed in magic, he might think that he was seeing some now.
Especially when he looked at Ellie.
The gold from those lights had caught in her hair, making it glitter like a halo; her cheeks were pink from the cold, and so was the tip of her nose. “It’s beautiful,” she said, her breath coming out on a cloud.
“Hey, guys,” he said. “Can you hold down the fort for about twenty minutes?”
“Sure,” Aiden said, looking serious, his dark brows drawn together.
Marco nodded. “Yeah.”
Caleb inclined his head. “Thanks. We’ll be back.”
“Where are we going?” Ellie asked.
The town wasn’t the only thing that was lit up. The glow from the lights above had her all brightened, too, and inside...he felt like he might glow just as bright. Because of her. “You just looked like you might want to see the town.”
“That was...thoughtful of you.”
They wandered out of the tree lot, down Main Street and toward the center of the town. Ellie pulled a beanie out of her purse and tugged it down low over her ears. “’Tis definitely the season,” she said, rubbing her arms.
“Yeah,” he said. “It is.” He put his arm around her, pulled her close and moved his hand slowly up and down from her shoulder to her elbow.
She looked up at him, and then looked around.
“No one’s paying attention.”
“Come on, now,” she said. “That’s not true. It’s a small town. People are always paying attention.”
“Well,” he said. “Oh, well.”
He lowered his arm then, but took hold of her hand, lacing his fingers through hers as they walked down the quieting streets.
The windows were still lit, even though the shops had all just closed.
They paused in front of the antiques store, and she looked inside. “Is that a squirrel?” she asked.
He looked in and saw it, a taxidermic squirrel in an extended pose up on top of the stack of antique tables. “Yes, I believe it is.”
“I don’t want that for Christmas,” she said.
He laughed. “What do you want for Christmas, then?”
“Well, not a platypus,” she said.
“Because they’re a scam?”
She laughed, and then the silence that fell over them seemed a little melancholy.
“What do you want?” he asked softly.
“Time alone with you would be nice,” she said.
“We are alone,” he said.
“We are not.”
“Basically,” he said, looking around.
“If you took your clothes off people would notice.”
He grinned. “Maybe.”
She looked up at him and smiled. “How about a puppy?”
“You don’t want a puppy. You already have chickens.”
“Well, the chickens could protect the puppy. Amelia would really like a puppy,” she said.
“Do you really want to hassle with one?”
“I should,” she said. “I should also decorate for Christmas. I should give her Christmas at our house.”
“You’ve never done that,” he said.
“No. Because I was afraid it would make me sad. Maybe it will. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing. It’s hard to explain. I’m done...grieving in that sense that people think of. I’m not sad all the time. Sometimes it hits me in a wave, but even then... I’m sorry he’s gone. But I can’t even picture what our life would have been like together right now. Too much has changed. I’ve changed too much. You just can’t... You can’t go back. And that, I think, has been the hardest thing for me to come to terms with. And I’m still coming to terms with it. I think I’ll always miss him. But it’s just... It’s in that way that you miss Christmas before it comes around. An ache that has some sweet things with it, too. I need to not be so scared of being sad when it’s time to be sad. Especially when it might be making Amelia miss out on something happy.”
They stopped in front of the toy-shop window, which had a display of windup toys, all moving together. “That’s creepy as hell,” he said.
She laughed. “Yeah. I can skip windup dolls under the Christmas tree.”
“So you do need a Christmas tree, though.”
“Yeah,” she said. “We’re definitely going to need a Christmas tree.”
“Luckily, you know a guy.”
“I do,” she said.
They paused at the end of the street, right in front of the town tree, which was a permanent fixture, not a cut tree that was installed every year. But a pine that had been growing there for a couple hundred years and got a new string of lights wrapped around it each Christmas.
“Or you can give me that one,” she said, elbowing him.
“Sure. Let me get my chain saw.”
“I already got what I wanted for Christmas,” she said.
“Really?”
“The list. It was my Christmas list anyway.”
He hadn’t thought about the list in what felt like years, but that was impossible since they had only been together a handful of times. Since this had all just started playing out maybe two weeks ago.
“Well, I think you should expand the Christmas list,” he said. “Because obviously you were thinking too small.”
“But this is good,” she said. “It’s what I needed. I mean, look, I’m ready to get a tree for my house.”
“What, you just needed...an orgasm so you could move on?”
She made a scuffing noise. “No. Anyway, moving on is the wrong word. You wake up one day to a life with the person you love not in it anymore. The decision to move on makes it sound like...they’re there, and you could choose to stay with them, but you’re not. You’re moving on. I was moved. Into a life that I didn’t choose. I think what I’m actually doing is choosing the different pieces of it. Making it richer and bigger. At first, all you can do is survive. Set dressing doesn’t really matter.”
“Did you just call my penis set dressing?”
She guffawed. And he really shouldn’t be that gratified that he’d made her laugh, not in the middle of such a serious discussion. But he knew that mattered to her. And he wanted to do things that mattered. “I would never call your penis set dressing. It is structurally integral to my current happiness.”
“Great. Glad to know that.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I’m not describing it very well. But it’s like... You go through the storm, whether you choose to or not. And when everything settles, you have to look at what you’re left with. Rebuild what you can, start over with what you can’t. You start with what you need to keep breathing. And eventually you get a big-screen TV.”
“Okay. In this scenario is my penis a big-screen TV?”
“This is ridiculous,” she said.
“Life is a little bit ridiculous,” he said.
Because here he was, standing with the woman he had loved once, and they were free to be together physically, because of circumstances he would never in a million years have chosen. Looking at a Christmas tree with her, wishing for more.
But he could see, clearly, in the words that she’d said, this was all part of her rebuilding. A stage.
She was adding things. Luxuries. Pleasure.
And he was glad.
But she would move on from it, too. That much was clear.
But... But if he did it right, then he would be a good memory. A good stop
on the road to healing.
And that, that really was something he owed Clint, because while he might have been a decent friend sometimes, he’d been really terrible a couple of times, too. He’d caused him trouble. He’d caused him grief.
He wouldn’t do the same to Ellie.
Suddenly, this didn’t feel like it was all about him.
He’d come into it in anger, unable to see what the hell she was doing, but suddenly, it was as bright and clear as those lights on the tree.
As was his part in it.
“Come on,” he said. “We better get back. They might have burned all the trees down.”
Ellie chuckled. “Yeah, maybe. But they probably didn’t. Because they’re pretty good boys in the end.”
“Yeah,” Caleb said. “I guess they are.”
Good boys who had done some bad things.
And that made him think of his own self.
And his concept of good.
But he shut that away and just focused on the way that Ellie’s hand felt in his. Because it was a much more pleasant thought.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CALEB DALTON NEVER did anything halfway. At least, that was how it was beginning to seem to Ellie. She couldn’t say that she had ever fully been aware of just how much of himself he put into everything.
But she was seeing it now.
With the way he ran the Christmas tree farm.
With the way he was in bed.
And most definitely with the way he had decided to commandeer Christmas at her house.
Because he had shown up early on a Sunday morning with not just a tree, but the most spectacular, beautifully formed tree she had ever seen, endless boxes of decorations, pine boughs, cranberries on a string, a Christmas village and...
Well, it looked like an electric cowgirl ornament.
“Some of it came from my mom,” he said, coming in with the first box.
Then he went back out, going to his truck to get more.
She just watched him, the way that his broad shoulders flexed as he carried everything. The barely noticeable strain on his forearms and biceps.
