The job was good. Better than good. Sweet students, good administrators, and…
How lucky was I?
I whispered it like an incantation. Lucky to have a career that paid well. Lucky to have this apartment, a skyline view instead of a forest one. Lucky that the biggest drama in my life was a temporary Wi-Fi outage.
Luck and peace and calm.
Those were my currencies here, but all of them evaporated the second I thought about Drew Benedict.
The image came uninvited: him in that flannel, sleeves rolled, a grin that made promises and apologies in the same breath. The way he saidHey, Mellike he was already halfway to forgiving me for every stupid wall I’d built.
I rubbed my arms, pacing. “Nope. We are not doing that.”
There’s an easy way to drown out thoughts in this city—noise with more noise. I opened the storage box from the closet labeledXMAS – SMALL APARTMENT VERSIONin my own handwriting and hauled it onto the coffee table.
Inside were the pieces of a season I was determined to fake until it felt real.
First came the lights. I pulled out the thin strings of warm white bulbs that had a permanent kink halfway through because I always wrapped them wrong. I untangled them slowly, looping them around the window frame so they glowed against the foggy glass. Outside, the rain had eaten what little snow Seattle had managed this year. Puddles reflected headlights like melted ornaments.
Next came the wreath. It was an artificial pine one with fake cranberries that looked too shiny to be edible and a red velvet bow that had seen better years. It wasn’t like the fresh wreath smell from Reckless River.
But whatever.
I hung it on the inside of the door because last time I’d tried putting one outside, some well-meaning neighbor thought it was theirs for the keeping.
I pulled out a ceramic reindeer with a chipped antler that I’d bought on clearance. A garland made of felt stars, each one a slightly different shade of red. A tiny Santa mug that held exactly half a cup of cocoa but twice as much nostalgia. I lined them across the mantle of the electric fireplace that pretended to crackle if you squinted.
When I reached the bottom of the box, tissue paper rustled around the last decoration: a snow globe. A small one, a cheapie that I bought at one of the small stores in Reckless River.
I sat back on my heels, heart doing that thing where it forgot whether it was supposed to ache or beat. Inside the globe, a miniature bridge spanned a frozen river, and if you shook it, flecks of fake snow swirled like memory refusing to settle.
“Of course, you’re here,” I murmured, setting it on the coffee table. “You just can’t stay out of my life, can you?”
The apartment glowed softly now, and outside, rain whispered against the windows instead of snow. Seattle didn’t do snow like Reckless River. When flakes fell here, they turned to slush before they hit the sidewalk. You could still see people pretending, though, umbrellas decorated with candy canes, shop windows painted with frosted outlines, a man selling paper snowflakes from a street corner.
I lit a peppermint-and-vanilla candle on the counter and let the scent fill the room. If I closed my eyes, I could almost trick myself into believing it was pine.
It was peaceful, I told myself again.
This was safety. This was sanity.
The quiet didn’t argue, but it didn’t agree either.
I moved to the kitchen, poured a glass of wine, and carried it back to the couch. The Christmas playlist I’d queued up last year started automatically—jazz standards, slow and comforting. Somewhere betweenHave Yourself a Merry Little ChristmasandI’ll Be Home for Christmas,my chest did that tight, traitorous thing again.
Home. The word had started to feel plural.
The city had always been my constant, but Reckless River had gotten under my skin. I took a long sip of wine.
“You need hobbies,” I told myself. “Knitting. Pottery. Literally anything that doesn’t involve emotional risk.”
But my eyes kept drifting back to the snow globe. It looked ridiculous on my glass-and-chrome coffee table—too sweet, too earnest, toohim.
I picked it up and shook it again. Snow spiraled, slow and hypnotic, around the tiny bridge.
When it finally settled, the reflection from my apartment lights turned the river inside to gold.
“Stop it,” I whispered, setting it back down. “He’s not magic. He’s just a man with good shoulders.”
