Chapter Twelve
? Nicolas ?
The entire cabin smells like cinnamon and jasmine.
It circulates through the vents, thickens in my lungs. Every breath is her and I don’t know how I’m supposed to ignore that.
Her.
Fucking Isla.
I pick at the tiny switch built into the car door to control the windows and locks with my nail.
Piper Falls blurs past the window, a familiar landscape of faces and shops I grew up seeing.
Most visits, it truly feels like nothing has changed and never will.
There’s a comfort in that, I tell myself.
During the last few holidays, I’d been so distracted by the prospect of seeing Isla that I don’t think I took the time to appreciate the charm and allure of my hometown.
That hasn’t changed, it seems. It’s all such a blur of chaos I almost forget where we’re going until we hit the outskirts of town where the neatly paved streets become dirt roads and uneven gravel.
The air thickens with snow and the sweet scent of sap that makes me homesick for Mom’s sugar cookies.
Part of me wishes we could just keep driving.
Leave Texas and return to New York. Drive straight to Mom’s house and not look back.
I don’t think Mom has ever met Isla. After the wedding, Macie insisted she and Dad had no business speaking anymore.
True, I suppose. I was fully grown. But even if Mom and Dad spoke, it was over text and calls.
And Mom had no reason to drive the twenty-seven hours to visit a woman who didn’t want her there…
even though it was Mom’s house initially.
Mom picked it.
Mom painted it. Put in the garden. Made it a home.
I know Macie is trying, but that house is foreign to me, despite it being the house my parents brought me home in thirty-one years ago.
I’m not nostalgic. I don’t cling to things. I moved away to be closer to my job and Mom moved closer to be with me. Piper Falls became something we talk about in past tense.
But she’s never met Isla.
We’ve spoken about her. I’ve told her the things Macie has told me and Mom only purses her lips and frowns the way she does when I was a teenager and she thought I was doing something that might hurt me.
Not once has she said a mean thing about Macie or Isla, though I know she has every reason to be upset with the former.
The latter…
Mom would like Isla. It’s not even a thought. A worry. I know it to the very core of my soul that Mom would take one look at her and pull her inside for tea. She’d spoil her. Treat her the way she would her daughter. She wouldn’t even bat an eye if we told her Isla belonged to both of us.
Granted, we’d definitely get an eyebrow lift, but Mom doesn’t cling to social norms. She believes that life is short.
We only get one shot. That would be the end of it.
We’d take Isla back to New York. She’d stay in our bed.
No spare bullshit. I’ll buy a bigger mattress if I need to.
Build a bigger closet. I’ll buy a house, if that’s what it takes.
But she’d be in our bed. Tangled between us.
I’d wake up and she’d be there, head tucked close to Dom’s, smooth skin painted that soft blue of early dawn.
Her belly would be full, stretched taut beneath the sheets.
My fingers curl, irritation nipping at the back of my skull at how easily I can see it.
How effortlessly it comes into focus. I already know how she’d feel beneath my palm as I brush it over the life we created.
How she’d sigh and shift closer to me, which would immediately prompt Dom to tighten his hold on her.
Maybe she’d wake up, sleepy lashes lifting, sleep heavy eyes finding me in the semi darkness.
She’d smile and reach for me, tug me back into bed with them, ignoring my halfhearted protest that I need to get to work.
“Five more minutes, Nicky,” she’d murmur, and I’d submit because she asked.
I’d kick out of my shoes and crawl back into her arms.
But that’s just a fantasy.
A pathetic delusion that will never happen because that space… her space would be empty the second things got too rough. I would live in perpetual fear of ever closing my eyes.
Yet, that fantasy continues to linger. Whisps of smoke clouding my sanity.
It draws me in deeper, encases me in the illusion of walking into the kitchen to her sitting at the island, our baby against her breast while Dom cooks breakfast. Us piled together on the sofa, a beautiful little girl with her mom’s bright eyes and pigtails in my lap while we watch Christmas cartoons.
I suck in a breath still scented with her and my traitorous cock twitches as if all too eager, willing and able to make my wish come true.
“Babe?”
The quiet murmur of Dominic’s voice has my head turning in the direction of my boyfriend. His dark eyes bounce between the road and me filled with questions and concern.
“Yeah?”
He nudges a chin in the direction of the windshield. “Left or right?”
I almost laugh at the blatant fork in the road. The two paths expand ahead like some cosmic joke.
One in the direction of Pine Meadows Farm.
One leading out of Piper Falls and back home.
I almost say right.
“Left.”
Dom turns the wheel and we continue along the winding path.
Pine Meadows Farm hasn’t changed since I was old enough to follow Dad through the maze of pine trees.
It’s still a three-story log cabin standing watch over a sprawling field of prickly branches dusted with a fine layer of snow.
Lights loop through branches and swoop overhead in a tent formation.
I remember as a child, I would run wild through the place.
Everything about it felt magical. That magic dimmed the older I got and the outing became a task I was compelled to attend.
It feels different again.
In the bright lull of early morning, the faint overcast of a lingering storm, the lights aren’t as sharp. They don’t cast the dazzling sparkle that I remember. Yet, when I roll out and reach for Isla’s door, something tingles through me.
Excitement?
I can’t fathom why, but it stays as she ducks out of her seat and lifts her face towards mine. The soft velvet brown of her eyes catch on my soul and I feel it like a punch.
“Thank you,” she whispers, and the faint rasp takes me back to her in the foyer, face wedged against Dom’s chest, sobbing like her world was shattering.
Memories of it steal every sprinkling of joy I’d been feeling, and it’s replaced with an anger, a homicidal hunger to find the person responsible and gut them. A strange and illogical desire when I’m a fucking lawyer. I help put crazy people behind bars. I don’t actively promote homicide, and yet…
I would for her.
I would commit all manners of atrocities for her.
Instead, I take a step back and wait for her to move so I can shut her door.
Dom appears at her other side and, without a word, takes her hand.
His big one swallows her tiny one with the curling of his fingers.
She doesn’t fight him. Doesn’t pull away.
She turns her face up to his with that same sweet expression of such trust and my boyfriend grins at her like they’d done this a million times.
And I’m not jealous.
I’m nearly certain I’m not. Not that he might like her more or that she might steal him. The gnawing in the pit of my stomach is from how easy they make it look.
How much I like seeing them together.
The knowledge alone has me falling back several steps to watch as Dom guides her along the slope in the direction of the arched opening.
Her dark hair gleams under the dull light hanging down her back.
Her shoulder bumps his with every step they take maneuvering between the neat rows lined with every type of pine.
“Mom nearly had a heart attack,” Dom’s saying when I tune into their conversation.
Isla’s laugh shatters through every cavity of my being, a tinkle of windchimes on a warm, summer afternoon. A brook deep in the forest. It’s such a startling thing to hear, I falter mid-step.
Have I ever heard her laugh before?
Why does it sound so unfamiliar?
“Did you get it?” she asks, peering up into my boyfriend’s face with a shimmer in her eyes that seizes around my stomach.
“Oh, hell no. I packed my shit and I left the house.”
Her pretty mouth hangs open in silent horror. “You left your mom there with that thing?”
“Listen, she was fine, okay? Dad was there,” Dom justifies, lips turned up in one corner. “They had it handled.”
Her stream of sweet giggles fills the space, and I inhale deep like I can somehow pull it all into my chest.
“I would keep it,” she states, calming slightly. “I’d build it a little nest and feed it nuts. Knit it booties.”
Why does the thought of her sitting in a rocking chair, slender fingers working knitting needles sound so fucking sexy? There is something seriously wrong with me.
“Can you knit?” Dom asks.
Isla hesitates. Tiny crinkles form across the bridge of her pert nose. “Not well. I taught myself a few years back but didn’t really have a reason to keep doing it.”
Baby blankets, I think stupidly. Baby booties. Baby hats. We could give her a reason to keep knitting.
Christ, I’m fucking losing it.
Infuriated at my single-minded train of thought, I veer off. I slip through to the next row of trees and then another. I put nearly three between us. Far enough away that her laugh can no longer sink its claws into me.
Instead, I focus on finding this damn tree.
Dad has always been wildly picky when it came to just the right one.
It needs to be plump along the bottom to cover all the presents and thinner towards the top to hold the star.
The branches need to be full and layered.
No holes or large gaps. The base needs to be thick, wide enough to stand on its own without a stand.