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But first she’d been left to die.
She stood and went to the window, looked out over the familiar landscape, then squared her shoulders, as if to shake off the thought.
It didn’t do to dwell on the dark sides of the past, not when there was so much brightness all around.
Ruby wanted to bring brightness.
It was why she was here.
2
First Presbyterian Church of Pear Blossom
CHRISTMAS PAGEANT
MARY—Lydia McKee
JOSEPH—Benjamin Smith
BABY JESUS—Hattie Mayfield
ANGEL OF THE LORD—Ruby McKee
THREE WISE MEN—Elizabeth Albright, Shannon Smith, Heath Mayfield
SHEPHERDS—Analise Johnson, Corbin Johnson, Aiden Mayfield
SHEEP—Jade Springer, Callie Springer, Sarah Marsh
OLD DONKEY—Dahlia McKee
DAHLIA
Ruby was home. Her mother had texted her a few minutes earlier, as if Dahlia had forgotten her younger sister would be here today. She shut her laptop off promptly at three, stretching at her small desk and looking around her office—which was essentially a closet.
She took the brass watering can off the windowsill and poured some water on her fiddle-leaf fig, which was beginning to look poorly, much to her chagrin.
It had been an office warming gift from her sister Marianne at Dahlia’s request. She’d thought that greenery might enliven the space more than a painting. Maybe she should have just gotten some abstract art for the wall. Something that she didn’t have to keep alive.
But the changes she’d made in the last five months—and the office itself—felt like an important step in her new, adult life, and she had thought that maybe a plant was a good way to commemorate that. Of course, she hadn’t anticipated failing at the plan, and she really hoped that it wasn’t a harbinger of doom for the rest of the endeavor.
She had been working at Spruce Coffee on Main Street for years while she wrote various pieces for websites and magazines. That was before she had gotten up the nerve to approach Dale Wainwright about being the first employee of thePear Blossom Gazettein more than a decade. The newspaper was coming up on its one hundredth year and Dahlia felt a keen connection to the publication. After all, when they had first discovered her sister Ruby on the bridge, reporters had become a constant in her life. And most specifically, reporters working at theGazette. Back then, the building had been filled with different staff. And that was before everything had moved on to the internet, damaging physical circulation, especially for a publication in a small town like this one. There had been an economic decline in the early 2000s, a dip in businesses on Main Street and in circulation of the newspaper.
But there was a change in town in the last ten years. Younger people had moved here looking for a simpler life, and more tourists chose to spend time in the small town, with businesses on Main Street finding their footing again now that local restaurants, banks and boutique stores were at the center of a revolution.
What Dahlia wanted to see was a return to print media as well. And to local news. News that really focused on the community.
She and Ruby had always been history nerds. They’d volunteered together at the historical society. Dahlia loved the mysteries of history. She loved old newspapers and piecing together information about the day through the lens of reporting and interviews. Ruby, though, seemed to like the quiet, bookish aspect of it. A much more fantasy-driven idea of what it meant to make that a career. Ruby had always imagined being impoverished—in a romanticized sense, naturally. And unemployable.
But that was the kind of thing they’d laughed about in their shared room as kids, while Ruby brooded about misters Darcy and Rochester.
I would love to be a poor, starving archivist warming myself by a pitiful fire surrounded by stacks of books.
Ruby, you missed lunch yesterday and almost chewed my arm off.
I mean it in the sense that I will have a small garret, my research and all the baguettes and cheese I want. A glamorous starvation.
So...not starvation.
