Chapter 6
Savannah
The problem with small towns is that they don’t let moments stay private.
They echo. Loudly. With very colourful commentary.
I’m barely twelve minutes away from the toy store when I spot my aunt’s car in the rearview mirror.
That familiar blue sedan with one headlight dimmer than the other, like it’s permanently winking at me.
She doesn’t honk. She doesn’t flash her lights.
She just follows, patient and unyielding, the way only family can.
That or the police.
I don’t bother pretending this is a coincidence. She parks behind me like she’s staking a claim.
“You look flushed,” Aunt Carol announces the second I open the door, breezing inside without waiting to be invited, coat already halfway off like she owns the place. “Which means one of three things: you’re sick, you’re lying, or Erik Beaumont is involved.”
She squints at me, lips twitching. “Judging by your face, I’m ruling out the flu.”
Aunt Carol is the kind of woman who makes sixty-five look like a suggestion, not a rule.
She keeps her hair long, usually pulled back in a loose twist or a low ponytail that never quite stays neat, silver threaded through the dark like she earned it on purpose.
Sometimes she wears glasses, sliding them onto the bridge of her nose only when she needs them, as if reading glasses are an accessory she refuses to commit to.
There’s something quietly quirky about her, whether it’s her unexpected scarves, worn boots that have clearly seen some life, or her laugh that comes out sharper than you expect. She has the calm confidence of someone who knows exactly who she is and stopped explaining herself years ago.
“I was outside,” I say, shrugging out of my coat. “Also, hi by the way.”
“It’s forty degrees!” Her eyes piercing into me. “Also yes, hi.”
“I walk fast.”
We enter the rental she is so graciously covering as she watches me hang my coat, her gaze sharp and practiced, taking in the details I wish she wouldn’t like the color still lingering in my cheeks, the slight tremor in my hands when I set my keys on the counter. I try my best to shake it all off.
She takes inventory of the space. “It’s cute but you know, you could just stay with me when you come home? We can stay up late? Eat chips? Drink too much wine? You know, have a a girls night. I don’t know why you always insist on being so alone when you’re surrounded by so much love.”
Oof.
“I saw you with Erik,” spoken like she’s offering a fact, not a verdict.
She delivers another hit with no reprieve.
Nothing like a one-two combo.
I stay silent.
“In the square,” she continues. “Then at the toy store. Then walking back together, staring into each other’s eyes.”
“That’s called volunteering,” I defend too quickly. “That’s the assignment. And what you’re doing? That’s called stalking.”
She smiles, small and knowing. “It’s called Pineview noticing and Aunts being aunties.”
“Please don’t,” I plead. “I don’t need an Aunt Carol lecture right now.”
“I’m not pushing,” she replies, hands in the air like I’m about to arrest her. “I’m grounding you, well not like that since you’re a woman now, but I’m grounding you back into Pineview. Into why you’re here.”
That lands harder.
She sets her purse down on the counter, the sound deliberate. “The realtor called this afternoon.”
I freeze.
“They moved everything up,” she continues. “Those heartless fools. Paperwork’s tomorrow morning.”
“Tomorrow?” Grief and shock flood all of my systems at once.
She nods. “The buyers want possession before Christmas Day. I can’t blame them but it sucks for us. The movers are scheduled for the afternoon. Anything left in the house gets packed and cleared. This is it.”
December twenty-fourth. The date hits like a blow to the chest.
Tomorrow isn’t just paperwork. It’s finality. Tomorrow I sign my name and release the house, with the walls holding all of my childhood, to strangers who will never know my mother’s laugh lived in those rooms.
Tomorrow the last of her things disappear into a truck.
“I thought we had more time,” I whisper.
“So did I,” Aunt Carol says softly, turning her gaze away from mine to collect herself. “But this is what happens when you finally say yes.”
Reality presses in, heavy and unavoidable.
This is why I’m here.
Not Erik.
Not The Christmas Kindness Drive.
Not Pineview nostalgia.
I’m here because after my mother died, everything became mine.
The paperwork. The decisions. The phone calls no one else returned.
My brother lives twenty minutes away and hasn’t set foot in this house in over a year. We don’t talk, not really anyways, save for the occasional half-hearted happy birthday text. We haven’t been the same since grief turned into resentment neither of us knew how to name.
My dad moved on faster than I could process, into a new relationship that came with occasional check-in texts and very little anything else. Hope you’re okay. Let me know if you need anything.
It was just me and my mom. Always. And now it’s just me, picking up all of the pieces.
“I’m not staying,” I say again, but the words sound different now, more resigned than defensive. “I’m here to sign. That’s it. Let’s just get through tomorrow.”
Aunt Carol studies me. “Is that what you told Erik?”
I swallow. “I didn’t tell him anything.”
“And that,” she says gently but firmly, “is how people get hurt.”
I turn toward her, frustration flaring hot and sudden. “I didn’t come back to reopen something. I came back to end something.”
She doesn’t argue.
Instead, she says quietly, “Erik already thinks this means more than it does. You know that boy has loved you since you were sixteen.”
“That’s not fair,” I quip back, my threshold already low anything could set me off.
“No,” she agrees. “It’s not fair. Life isn’t fair but neither is letting him believe this is the beginning when you know it’s the closing chapter.”
Silence stretches between us, thick with everything I don’t want to admit.
“He’s finishing the cart tonight,” she adds. “Without you. He told Mrs. Kincaid you had enough on your plate. Said you shouldn’t feel rushed. Said you should just be here with family.”
I close my eyes. I didn’t ask him to do that.
“I’m not doing this,” I say, sharper now.
Aunt Carol steps closer, her voice soft but unyielding. “Then don’t let him think he’s something you’re passing through too.”
After she leaves, the rental feels wrong.
It feels too quiet, but not the gentle kind. It feels hollow. It’s a quiet that echoes back at you when there’s nothing left to distract from what you’re avoiding.
I stand at the narrow kitchen sink long enough for the sky outside the single window to go completely dark and absolute. My reflection stares back at me in the glass with my eyes rimmed with exhaustion, jaw locked tight, shoulders already braced like I’m about to take a hit I can’t duck.
December twenty-fourth.
I wrap my arms around myself, suddenly aware of how thin the walls are here and how absurd it is that I chose this place when my family is five minutes away, filling a house with laughter, nourishment and people who know exactly how to sit with grief without trying to fix it.
I tell myself this is practical, to have neutral ground, space to breathe and that tomorrow is just signatures, boxes and keys changing hands.
The truth presses in anyway. It always finds a way.
We all grow up knowing, in some distant, abstract way, that this day will come. One day we’ll lose our mothers and wish for more time. It’s part of the bargain of loving someone so completely but it’s a grief you imagine arriving later, softened by decades, by a life already lived.
It’s something that belongs to your fifties, your sixties, your seventies, after long conversations and shared holidays and enough memories to steady you.
Not now. Not at twenty-six, when you’re still learning who you are, still reaching for the future with both hands, still expecting your mother to be there when you turn around.
I feel torn in half by it; the instinct to disappear when things hurt and the quieter pull toward people who would let me cry into a dish towel and still ask if I’ve eaten.
I feel torn by the version of myself who learned to handle everything alone and the woman who is finally realizing she doesn’t have to.
Endings are louder right before Christmas. Standing there in a borrowed kitchen with borrowed quiet, it hits me that I’ve been carrying this alone for so long, I don’t even remember how to set it down.
I hastily pack up the rental, swipe the car keys off the counter and head to the place where I know I am supposed to be tonight.
Where I need to be.