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I smiled sheepishly, not sure how he would take it. “We spent the week making decorations. Addy got the bug, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her no.”
“You made decorations for me?” Knox closed the door to the deck and leveled his gaze on me.
“Addy wanted to give you something to remember us by, and it snowballed into this whole project. We made popcorn garland and ornaments out of paper. It’s nothing fancy. Nothing like what Holly makes for your shop. So don’t get too excited.” I chuckled nervously. Gary never liked Addy’s artwork. He said it didn’t match his décor.
Knox’s eyes filled with an emotion I couldn’t pinpoint. “I’m touched you went to the trouble.”
“It was mainly Addy. She wanted to do it for you.”
Knox cleared his throat, then clapped his hands together. “Let’s get these decorations. They sound better than what I have.”
Addy ran out the front door to the car I’d left unlocked. “If you don’t like them, you don’t have to keep them up. But please don’t say anything to her tonight.”
His forehead wrinkled. “I’m sure I’m going to love them. No one’s ever made me decorations before.”
“Don’t get too excited until you see them.” I knew Knox wasn’t the same person as Gary, but I wanted to protect Addy from any criticism, no matter how impossible that task was.
“I’ll love them because you and Addy made them.” Knox smiled, and his affection for us was evident.
“I hope so,” was all I could manage as Addy returned with the bag of popcorn garland.
“We should start with the lights, then put these on,” Addy said, opening the bag and pulling out the strands of popcorn.
“Wow. This is amazing. How did you stop yourself from eating the popcorn?”
Addy paused to look up at him. “We ate a lot of the popcorn.”
I laughed, finally relaxing now that I saw that Knox wouldn’t reject her creations. “We made and ate a ton of popcorn this week. The garland isn’t easy to make. We had to put the string through each piece.”
Knox helped Addy pull the strands out of the bag. He rested them gently on the large sectional.
While he put the lights on, I brought in the rest of our decorations. I’d wanted to buy some, but Addy insisted on making everything.
“Which ornament should we put on first?” Knox asked Addy when I returned.
Addy’s eyes lit up as she reached into the box and dug out one she’d made in preschool with her picture laminated on the outline of a star. “This one, so every time you look at the tree, you think of me.”
“I don’t need your picture to do that, but I love it,” Knox said as he took the yarn hook and hung it by the top branch.
My breath caught in my throat.
“Every time I look at the tree, I’ll remember how you made everything on it.”
“I didn’t make the lights,” Addy corrected him.
Knox chuckled. “Right.”
I loved watching the two of them interact. I expected Knox to get sick of having her around or to be impatient with her. But so far, he hadn’t.
With each ornament we pulled out of the box, Addy explained how she made it. She filled the conversation, so I put on holiday music for the background and handed them the decorations when they were ready for another one. Then I watched the two of them as they discussed the perfect placement. “We might be here all night, at this rate.”
“These things can’t be rushed,” Knox said with a wink, and my skin heated.
Gary wouldn’t want to spend his evening decorating a tree with homemade decorations. What was it about Knox that made him different? Knox enjoyed kids, but it was more than that.
Being good with kids wasn’t a characteristic I was looking for in a boyfriend when I got pregnant with Addy, but maybe it should have been.
“What do you think?” Knox asked me.
