I didn’t see her again. For three years.
Three Years later
Christmas Eve
Nick
I tooka deep breath as I made my way up to the front door. I could hear the party happening inside. Knew Ant and Birdie would already be here with my sister and brother, Mads and Julian.
My family. My rocks. The people who claimed me and who I claimed back.
My family had been coming to the Barnes house for Christmas parties for as long as I could remember. We’d hosted their entire crew almost as many times for Thanksgiving. Which was no easy feat when you’re talking about cooking for six kids.
Antony and Birdie loved it. They would have brought enough food for thirty people to this party. The leftovers would go on for days. It was my favorite time of the year. It always had been.
Until something, or rather someone, had changed all that.
Once again, I had to consider if it was my fault.
No, that wasn’t true. I knew whose fault it was originally. It was Nora’s fault for getting some stupid crazy idea in her head. It was the stuff that happened after that night, so maybe I had to share some of the blame.
Avoiding her those last few weeks of summer before she left for school.
Staying away, creating space between us, seemed easier.
Then there was her farewell party before she went off to college in Vermont…and I’d stayed away from that too.
Simpler, I thought. Because what we really needed was time apart. Time to reset. Time to forget everything she’d said, so we could go back to being what we were.
Lifelong family friends.
Only now I could see that might have been the wrong approach because she seemed to get the back-off message a little too well.
Because Nora didn’t come home for that Thanksgiving or Christmas, choosing instead to go out west with her roommate to see California. She went to Florida over Spring break. She stayed and worked at a summer camp in Vermont for the entire season, never once coming home to Calico Cove.
Instead, the Barnes family took a trip to see her.
Then last year it had been her new boyfriend, Brian, whose family she’d spent the holidays with.
Roy hadn’t been happy. He’d made that known when I asked him about why she wasn’t coming home, but he’d said he had to acknowledge that Nora was an adult and could make her own choices. That he’d needed to start letting his little girl go.
Letting go seemed a bit harsh to me. She was barely an adult having just turned twenty this past summer. Not even legal to drink.
Now here it was Christmas again. Nora was in her junior year at school. As far as I knew, the boyfriend was in the rear view mirror and no one had tempted her with trips to other parts of the country, so she had deigned to finally come home.
To celebrate her glorious return, the Barnes were having a massive Christmas Eve open house. Basically, everyone in town was invited to stop in and say hello.
It would have been odd, if I’d stayed away from this party. People would have talked. Asked questions.
Also, I didn’t want to stay away.
Counting it down, it had been two years and six months since I’d even laid eyes on Nora Barnes. Surely that was enough time for any awkward events to be considered firmly in the past? There was no reason to expect that I wouldn’t open the door to the Barnes family home, feel the heat and press of the partygoers, and minutes after that, feel the arms of Nora wrapping herself around me in a huge welcoming hug.
Because it had been two years and six months since she’d seen me too. Hugging was to be expected. Wasn’t it?
Another deep breath, and I opened the unlocked front door.
It was as I expected. The heat from the house hit me in the face as soon as I stepped inside, a direct contrast to the cold wind swirling just outside the door.
