Total pages in book: 39
Estimated words: 37164 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 186(@200wpm)___ 149(@250wpm)___ 124(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 37164 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 186(@200wpm)___ 149(@250wpm)___ 124(@300wpm)
I wonder if she ever missed this. Pineview. The way the square hums, the way Christmas here feels earned instead of packaged. I wonder if she ever thought about the night she left and whether it landed the same way it did for me.
Then she turns.
Our eyes meet across the square, and it’s like the air shifts.
The years don’t vanish, but they rearrange themselves. I’m not eighteen anymore, standing beside her under this same tree, promising things I didn’t yet understand. I’m not the boy who watched her taillights disappear down the road and told himself this was what loving her meant.
I’m a man who stayed.
She looks surprised and caught off guard in the way you are when something you didn’t plan for arrives anyway. Her expression softens, and something like relief flickers across her face before she schools it away.
I smile first. I usually did. It’s impossible to look at Savannah Joy and not smile. It’s instinct. It’s also a reflex built from years of knowing that she needed reassurance before anything else.
I move toward her slowly, deliberately. She smells polished up close, with notes of cool citrus, soft sweetness, the kind of scent that lingers on coats and skin long after you’ve left the room. It stirs a memory.
“Savannah.” My voice sounds steadier than I feel.
“Erik.” Hearing my name in her voice again does something quiet and unmistakable to my body.
We stand there, suspended, until I latch onto something safe and familiar.
“You always forget how cold it gets here,” I nod toward her coat.
She scoffs automatically, defensive in the way she always was. “I did not.”
I step closer, lowering my voice. “You did. You always do.”
She pulls her coat tighter, and the gesture is so achingly familiar it almost makes me laugh.
Something shifts between us then. It’s subtle but we both feel it. It’s more than nostalgia. It’s recognition.
“Welcome home.”
She doesn’t argue and that might be the most hopeful thing I’ve felt in years.
5
Savannah
Running into Erik in the square felt like fate.
I left him once when I was young, scared, certain I was choosing my future and some small, defensive part of me expected him to make me pay for it. I braced for distance or resentment. I mentally prepared for the kind of polite indifference that hurts worse than anger. I told myself he’d be colder now, sharper, maybe even a little cruel in the way men sometimes become when they’ve been left behind or feel their egos bruised.
He is none of those things. He couldn’t be farther from them.
Erik is patient, stable and kind in a way that isn’t performative or strategic, the way a lot of men are when they want one thing and one thing only. He doesn’t flinch when he looks at me. He doesn’t punish me with silence or nostalgia. He treats me like someone who mattered and still does. That might be the most disarming thing of all.
Not to mention the problem I wasn’t prepared for at all.
He is devastatingly hot.
Being assigned to work with him feels like punishment.
I learn this the next morning in the back room of Pineview’s community center that smells faintly of burnt coffee and old pine cleaner, the kind of institutional warmth that never quite disappears no matter how many winters pass. Folding chairs line the walls, mismatched and scuffed from decades of town meetings and holiday planning, and a long table in the center is buried beneath clipboards, half-dried markers, and a tray of cookies no one ever admits to bringing.
The room hums with quiet chatter, every face is a familiar one and too many curious glances to keep track of. People are pretending not to look at me while absolutely looking at me. I grip the clipboard I definitely did not ask for and shift my weight, painfully aware that I am once again visible in a place that remembers me too well.
The realization lands suddenly, like a door closing behind me. I haven’t been in this room since my mother was alive.
My eyes drift to the whiteboard at the back of the room.
It’s still there and most importantly, so is her handwriting.
It’s faded now, half-erased beneath newer notes, but it’s hers. I would know it anywhere. I’ve memorized the rounded letters, slightly slanted O’s and L’s. It felt optimistic even when she was being practical.
One cart can change everything.
Love each other. Don’t overthink it.
My throat tightens.
This is where she used to stand, marker tucked behind her ear, calling people sweetheart and pretending not to notice when they teared up but having a tissue at the ready. This is where she used to glance at me across the room like she was sharing a secret only we knew.
I look away before the grief can crest too high.
Mrs. Kincaid stands at the front like a general preparing for battle, steel-gray hair swept into place. She taps her pen against her clipboard, the sound sharp enough to cut through the murmurs. She’s been at this for as long as I can remember. The Christmas Kindness Drive is synonymous with Mrs. Kincaid.