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She nodded toward his front yard. “Is that the reason for all the decorations?”
It was so bright out there, the light streamed in through the blind-covered windows. When combined with the glow from the gigantic Christmas tree, there wasn’t even a need to turn on a lamp.
“It’s a front yard any kid would dream about,” she said.
He smiled. “Yeah, I think her friends appreciate it more than she does. She’s gotten used to it. The tough part is that it was so easy to get all this done when we lived in New York. Here, I had to track down a company that could do it for me. Luckily, there was one in Knoxville, but it’s still not quite what we had in New York.”
Her eyebrows arched, and he could imagine what was running through her mind. Yeah, it was extravagant, but he’d spare no expense when it came to J.J.
“Part of it’s my upbringing.” He picked up his drink and took a long sip while he thought through how he was going to explain it. It was way too complicated to boil down to a sentence or two. “Being raised by my grandmother, it was just the two of us, just like me and J.J. Mom had been an only child too, so I didn’t have cousins. There was no one my age to hang out with like other kids had.”
Wow, this sounded like a pity party. He certainly didn’t want to be a Christmas Day downer. Still, for some reason, he felt like she should know this about him. He wanted her to understand where he came from, who he was as a human being. He wanted her to really get to know him, and if she decided to run, then it was never going to work in the first place.
One thing he’d learned in his life was that love wasn’t permanent. People came and went with the seasons. That was one lesson J.J. wouldn’t learn, if he had anything to do with it. She’d never have to lose a parent again. He’d be there for her until she was grown. Until she was old enough to have faith that when she fell in love with someone, that person would stick around.
“So, did your grandmother decorate for Christmas?” Faith asked.
That was a good question. She probably assumed he turned his front yard into a winter wonderland because it was something he missed out on as a child. That wasn’t the case at all.
“She had me do it.” He smiled. “From the time I was about twelve, I’d climb up on that ladder and attach lights to the roof, and then I started doing the trees and the shrubs.”
This conversation had taken him straight down memory lane. He couldn’t help but smile. He missed Nana Pryce, for sure.
“She went overboard inside the house,” he said, still smiling. “Not a single surface wasn’t covered in some sort of trinket normally, but she’d replace them all with Christmas knickknacks the day after Thanksgiving. And then there was her Christmas village. It was basically a country by the time I graduated high school.”
“Your grandmother sounds like a great person,” Faith said.
“She was.” He nodded. “She did the best she could, raising me. I lost her right after my wedding. She never got to meet her great-granddaughter.”
“I like to believe our loved ones look down on us after they’re gone. They’re our guardian angels.”
The words surprised him. Sure, they’d gone to church the night before, but he wasn’t used to having conversations where religion came up. He supposed he’d gotten pretty bitter over it, having lost so many people he loved.
“That’s what my grandmother would want me to believe,” he said.
Faith frowned. “You don’t?”
He took a deep breath and slowly let it out. This was an even tougher conversation than death.
“I guess my life experience has made me a little bitter,” he finally said. “When you lose so many people who are close to you, you start to think maybe if there was a God, he wouldn’t be so unfair.”
Now she was studying, but not judging, him. He appreciated that, but it shouldn’t have surprised him. He’d somehow known from the moment he met her that he could open up to her about anything. He trusted her.
“Life definitely isn’t fair.” She shifted her gaze to the Christmas tree. “But there are so many gifts all around us, it’s hard to believe that there’s not a greater purpose for all of it. It’s funny, but as devastated as I was a couple of days ago, I was relieved at the same time. I’d accepted that I was going to spend the rest of my life across a gigantic ocean from all the people I loved. My relationship ending took a huge weight off my shoulders.”
“You must have been in love with him if you were willing to give up so much.”
Now she shifted her gaze away from the tree, staring straight ahead thoughtfully. “I think I was in love with the glamour of it all. For the first time, I got to be the sister who was doing something exciting. People would say I’d moved to Europe, got married, started a family. Everyone in Misty Mountain would finally see me as successful. Or maybe it was just that they’d finally see me.”
There was a lot of information packed into those words. And he had a feeling there was a lot she wasn’t saying.
“Now, you’re engaged to me.” He added a big smile to that. “The town hunk.”
That was said totally in jest, so when she didn’t return his smile, he worried she thought he was serious. Or worse, didn’t agree at all with his words. But the longer the silence dragged on, the more he realized this was a topic near and dear to her heart. It truly bothered her that she’d failed at something she didn’t really want to do in the first place.
“I’m relatively new to this town,” he said. “But if there’s one thing I’ve noticed, it’s that people gossip for their own entertainment more than anything else. Nobody’s judging you. What they’re doing is living vicariously through you.”
She looked at him then, her eyes suddenly filled with a sparkle that hadn’t been there before. “I’ve never thought about it that way, and I don’t know why I’m trying to impress people, anyway. It’s not a specific person. It’s just wanting to be that hometown hero. I may not be on TV every day, but at least they can say I left for some glamorous life somewhere else…”
