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Charlotte’s cheeks were blotchy. “This place is home to some of my favorite Christmas memories,” she said, her voice breaking. “It was the coziest place in the world. And these designs you made?” She shook her head. “The foyer looks like a futuristic airplane. The new living room looks like a doctor’s office! And I can’t begin to understand your removal of the library! A small-town inn like this needs a library! And didn’t you even consider how long it took my grandfather to assemble all the books in that library?”
“Some of them are moldy!”
Charlotte made her hands into fists. “Most of them are fine!”
“Most of them.” Charlie rubbed his temples. “Don’t you understand? This inn has gone the way of hundreds of inns across the United States. It hasn’t been updated to fit the luxuries required of the modern American upper-middle-class. It’s stuck in a dusty, uncomfortable past.”
“Let me guess,” Charlotte shot back. “You hated your childhood.”
Charlie rolled his eyes. “I didn’t hate my childhood. I just don’t feel the need to mummify my childhood. Just like modern architecture, I’ve moved on.”
Charlotte took a dramatic step toward him so that the tip of her nose was no more than a few inches from his. “The Cherry Inn will never look like this. The fact that you even imagined it like this is an insult to everything my grandparents built.”
Charlie cackled. “This is ridiculous. Do you even know who I am?”
“Do you even know where you’re standing?” Charlotte shot back.
Charlie shivered with laughter and outrage. He rolled back up his designs and shoved them into the protective cylinder, his nostrils flared. “I’ve never met anyone more ungrateful than you, Charlotte Summers. I’m actually impressed. I can’t wait to tell everyone back in Manhattan that a nobody from White Plains rejected Charlie Bryant’s designs.”
“I really hope you tell them,” Charlotte cried. “Tell them you’ve completely lost your Christmas spirit! Tell them you’re an outright Ebenezer Scrooge!”
Charlie tossed his head and stomped back toward the foyer. The floorboards crackled and popped beneath him, still more proof of the tremendous work the old inn required. He wouldn’t be the one to do it. Perhaps it would crumble and be little more than a heap of old stones and wooden slats three Christmases from now. What would Charlotte do with her memories, then? Oh, she would regret this day.
At the door, Charlie turned to glare back through the darkness, where Charlotte remained near the ornate couch, her arms twisted over her chest. Charlie had the sudden sensation that he was eighteen years old, bickering with his high school girlfriend. As he caught Charlotte’s gaze, he forgot, momentarily, what he’d been so upset about. Couldn’t they just hug and makeup? Couldn’t they laugh about this?
“Do you need help with the door?” Charlotte called.
Charlie’s rage filled his chest again. He yanked at the doorknob as he responded, his tone sarcastic: “Merry Christmas, Charlotte Summers. Good luck on your journey into nostalgia. I’m sure it’ll get you somewhere.”
“Thanks so much!” Charlotte said. “Hope to see you never again!”
Charlie stormed out of the inn and slammed the door behind him. For the next fifteen minutes, he stomped along the sidewalk, glaring at whoever passed him by, his heartbeat racing. But when he reached the forest trail, he stopped short, gasped for breath, and touched the trunk of a maple to support himself. His head swam with images of Charlotte, with the memories she’d tried to translate to him from this long-ago childhood. He shook them away. Even still, his lips quivered into a smile. What had gotten into him? Why could he still hear Charlotte’s voice in his mind?
ChapterNine
December 2003
It had been Sarah’s idea to go on the road trip. As she put it, it had been a difficult few years for the two of them, and they needed a break. Their list of obligations and stressors was a mile long. For years, Charlie had traipsed from one job to the next in the Chicago suburbs, and Sarah had been working at a restaurant down the road from their apartment, slinging burgers and fries to pay what she could of the bills. Nights, she studied the law, bent on finishing undergrad and then moving on to law school. They never seemed to have quite enough money— but they managed to scrape by, often by the skin of their teeth. Charlie continued to remind Sarah that his big break was just around the corner and that people would give him a chance in the world of property development soon. Sarah believed him, even when Charlie wasn’t sure if he believed in himself.
Charlie was twenty-nine, and Sarah was twenty-five. They’d been married for four years, which felt like both a long time and a very short time. Charlie felt as though Sarah was the only person who’d ever actually known him; at the same time, he felt as though they were still discovering little nuances about one another. When Charlie met people in the developer business who talked about their “thirty-five-year-long marriages,” he tried and failed to imagine that much time with Sarah. It was impossible to picture them old, to imagine Sarah’s face with wrinkles and gray hair on Charlie’s head. This was one of the problems with being young, Charlie knew. It was impossible to remember that it wouldn’t last forever.
Sarah had mapped out the road trip. On the first day, they’d taken a ferry from Chicago to the west coast of Michigan, where they’d driven up to Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes. Despite the twenty-degree chill, they’d run down the biggest sand dune either of them had ever seen. They’d then needed thirty-five minutes to crawl back up it, taking frequent breaks to gaze behind them at the turquoise blue. “The lake looks like photographs of the Mediterranean,” Sarah said. Charlie promised her he’d take her to the Mediterranean someday. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Bryant,” Sarah joked. “Let’s get this road trip finished first. Maybe in a few decades, we can talk about getting over to Europe.”
That first night, they grabbed a motel room in a tiny town and watched television, sitting up in bed. They laughed at the Michigander accent and tried to imitate it, drawing out their vowels.
“You can’t do it,” Sarah said. “Your accent is way too Chicago. You couldn’t be from anywhere else.”
“And you sound too New England for anything else,” Charlie joked.
Sarah was originally from Maine. She’d moved to Chicago at age twelve and had never fully lost her accent. Charlie had met her when she was twenty, and he was twenty-four. He’d just gotten out of a long-term relationship and hadn’t been looking for anything serious. Sarah had changed his mind with the briefest glance. He’d known something in the belly of his soul, something that didn’t even make sense to him at the time. She was the one. But at first, when he’d asked her out, she hadn’t believed they would be anything to one another. She’d said she was in love with someone else.
In the car headed toward Niagara Falls, Charlie brought this up again. “Who were you in love with?”
Sarah eyed him from the passenger seat. “What are you talking about?”
“When we first met, you told me you were in love with someone else. You wouldn’t go out with me.”
Sarah laughed. “You remember that?”
