The Christmas Eve Delivery (Festive Flames #3)

1. Lydia

1

LYDIA

T his didn’t feel real. And it didn’t feel like a dream, more like a reflection from one of those funhouse mirrors. It was reality, but warped, tipped up on its side. I was being spoken to. More like talked at. All I heard was “Wah, wah, wah.” There were no real words, at least none that were getting through my head.

Was this grief? Relief? I didn’t have the words for how I was feeling. Was I even feeling? I wasn’t numb. But I wasn’t sad, either.

The last time I had experienced grief, the deep in my soul, gut-wrenching, thought-my-heart-would-stop-beating grief, was when I found the bunny from the back yard dead on the side of the street. It wasn’t even a pet, and yet, I felt that little furry creature’s absence so intensely, I threw up from crying so hard.

I hadn’t found Aunt Ruth. She had passed away in a hospital bed. I had visited her, told her I would come back the next day to see her. Only, when I came back, she had already passed away. I hadn’t cried that day, and I wasn’t crying now.

I had a flashback to when Mom had died. I had been too numb to cry, too devastated to function. At least for several weeks. I poked around in my memory and compared those feelings to what was rolling around in my skin this time.

“Not the same,” I muttered.

“Excuse me?” the lawyer, Greg Blake, asked.

I had to blink a few times and bring myself back to the here and now. I was sitting in the conference room at his office. I was not floating in the cotton candy fluff that was my semi-consciousness.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m having a difficult time focusing. It’s all so much.” I hoped the words fit the situation. I had no idea what he had been saying, or what I had interrupted.

“It can be quite overwhelming. I’m aware. Would you like a few minutes to gather your thoughts?”

I gave him an unenthusiastic nod. It took effort to move my head. That was part of this whole grief thing, right? The ability to move, to think, all gone.

My hands rested on the table in front of me. There was a stack of papers there as well, but there was no possible way I was functional enough for any level of reading comprehension. Carefully, I aligned the papers before pushing them slightly farther away from me.

My hands rested comfortably in the now empty table space. It was interesting how unprompted, my hands naturally formed two reflective shapes. Was one mimicking the other? Did my right hand copy the left, or was it the other way around? The shadows on my fingers were exactly the same from the artificial lighting in the room. There were no windows, no streams of sunlight, no reminder of a dreary, cloudy day. I couldn’t remember the weather. I was here because Aunt Ruth was dead. The weather should have been gloomy.

But I wasn’t exactly sad, so why did I expect the weather to reflect that particular mood? If sunny weather fit happy moods and rain equated sad, then what was indifferent weather?

But I wasn’t indifferent. Indifferent meant I would simply shrug it off. Aunt Ruth was gone. That meant no more of her snide, passive-aggressive comments. I would no longer have her constantly telling me how I was doing everything wrong. But it also meant that I wouldn’t have her to tell me how to fix it. All mistakes moving forward would be all mine. I was going to have to figure out how to correct my mistakes.

I have no idea how long I sat there staring at the way my hands rested on the table. I had no other thoughts at that time, just hands on a smooth table.

“Miss Walsh, do you need anything?”

Slowly, I lifted my head and shifted my gaze from my hands to the face of the assistant leaning in the conference door. I knew her, only at that moment, I couldn’t remember her name or how I knew her.

I blinked a few times. Did I need anything?

“No, I don’t need her back. It’s going to be an adjustment, but I’ll figure it all out.”

She shook her head at my response. “I’ll be right back.”

When she left, I just stared at the empty doorway. A few minutes later, Mr. Blake was back.

“Lydia, I think maybe we should do this another time,” he said.

“But why? Waiting won’t change the fact that Ruth died and dumped the inn on me. Waiting won’t bring my mother back. Why did that bunny have to die when it got hit by a car?”

And in a flash, I went from overwhelmed and confused to crying my eyes out. I gasped as I tried to suck in air. I couldn’t see, and my face turned into a complete snot factory. Mr. Blake had to place a tissue in my hands. There was no way I would have seen it if he'd held a box of tissues out to me. After I went through several tissues, someone handed me a plastic bottle of water with the top already twisted off.

I sipped, cried, and settled into an embarrassing case of the hiccups.

I was left alone. I was checked on. It seemed to be a repeat of previous motions. I suspected they would continue this way until I was either cognizant enough to move forward with providing a signature that wasn’t under duress, or I got my shit together enough to accept the suggestion of rescheduling.

I excused myself to the restroom. No one was in the conference with me, so I wasn’t sure who I thought I was talking to. I splashed cool water on my face. My eyes were red and puffy from crying.

Aunt Ruth’s death was nothing if not complicated. To the outside world, it was straightforward. The aged great aunt who raised me after my mother’s death died, and she was leaving me everything. A mixed blessing, an unfortunate loss culminating in a reasonably generous inheritance. But people on the outside didn’t know the truth of our relationship. I was young enough to believe that adults who took care of children should actually also like them a little bit. I spent years hurt and confused, and then I spent more years trying to figure everything out. I was still in the figuring things out part of my life when all of this happened.

Her illness wasn’t a surprise, and honestly, neither was her death. But this reaction, or anti-reaction, I was having was sending me into a tailspin. I didn’t know whether I should sign all the papers and pop open a bottle of champagne or eat a pint of ice cream. I was leaning toward the ice cream. Drinking too much gave me a muzzy feeling.

“Sorry about all of that,” I said as I returned toward the conference room. Mr. Blake stood at the door to the conference room, probably wondering where I had gone. “I’m ready to sign everything.”

We sat down and he began his speech about what I needed to sign and how these documents officially transferred ownership of Sweet Mountain Inn to me. The rest of the documents were granting permissions for transfers of funds between accounts and changing the names on the accounts from Ruth to me, her only surviving relative. Everything was straightforward, business, business, business.

It still sounded like a lot of “Wah, wah, wah,” but this time, I was able to listen and comprehend his actual words. I still felt like a shell of my former self. I wasn’t complete. My grief left me without a sense of wholeness.

When I emerged from his office into the daylight, it really felt incongruous that the sun was out. There were still some slushed up, muddy piles of snow that had yet to melt. The world was trying to shake off its icy winter coat and let spring take its turn. A sharp, cold breeze caught me off guard, and with a shiver, I stopped walking long enough to zip up the front of my coat. The sunshine had fooled me into thinking that it might be warmer outside than it really was.

I walked the few blocks of downtown Brookdale back home. The inn sat back from the road and looked more like a run-down mansion than a once fancy hotel. There was one sign on the lawn and a second one across the entryway naming it Sweet Mountain Inn . And I knew there were very clear signs on the door stating that we were currently closed to guests.

The inn had no visitors when Aunt Ruth took ill, and I wasn’t in the right headspace to juggle her needs and take care of visitors. I hadn’t felt like dealing with running a hotel throughout the process, so the signs stayed up.

So when the man in the expensive wool trench coat was waiting for me on the porch, I was caught off guard.

“Are you Miss Walsh?” he asked as he got to his feet.

“I am.”

“You were highly recommended to me,” he started.

“Look.” I cut him off. “I don’t know who told you to come here, but the inn is closed. I’m not taking guests. There’s a hotel out by the freeway. They usually have rooms.”

He held out a business card. I took it without thinking.

“That’s not why I’m here. I wanted to see if you had thought about selling this old place.” He twisted and looked around the porch. It needed some visible repairs.

“It’s not for sale. I’m not selling.”

“I heard you recently inherited, and it looks like a lot of work to take on for someone as young as yourself.”

I thrust my arm out, finger extended, pointing to the road. “Get the hell off my property, you fucking shark.”

“You have my card if you change your mind.”

I crushed the business card in my hand and feebly hurled the wadded up paper at him.

“How dare you try to take advantage of someone in their state of shock and grief, you charlatan!”