Chapter 9 - Nostalgia and Nightmares
Ella
The snow was falling gently outside, a soft, hushed blanket covering the world as I slipped away from the kitchen. My steps were quiet as I wandered toward the study.
I hadn’t dared step inside since I arrived. Something about it felt sacred, sealed off—like a space where the very air still held my grandfather’s breath, a place imbued with his quiet presence.
The door creaked as I pushed it open. Dust motes danced in the golden late-afternoon light filtering through the window.
Shelves lined the walls, crowded with worn books whose spines cracked with age, weathered photographs curling at the edges, and artifacts from another life—thick ranching manuals annotated in the margins, heavy cattle ledgers filled with neat columns, even a framed county fair ribbon from 1979, faded but still proudly displayed.
Then I saw the desk.
Heavy. Oak. Scratched by years of use. On top, an old ledger sat beside a cracked leather journal, its cover worn smooth from countless touches.
I sat slowly, my fingers tracing the cracked leather, and opened the journal, bracing myself for more numbers, more grim financials.
Instead, I found words—looping script in faded blue ink, spilling across the pages. Letters. Dozens of them. All addressed to my mother. And none mailed.
I miss you every day, Katherine. I watch the birds and wonder if you see the same ones in your city. I wish I had been a different man. I wish I had said the words when it mattered.
I swallowed hard, flipping through more pages. They spanned years—some short, others pages long. Regrets. Updates. Memories. He’d written to her like she might answer back. Like maybe she’d come home.
Tears welled, sudden and hot, burning a path down my cheeks. I’d spent my whole life carrying the quiet ache of thinking we’d been forgotten, that my mother and I were the shame he never wanted to see again.
But he remembered. All of it. Every missed moment, every silent thought, poured onto these pages.
A framed photo caught my eye on the bookshelf behind me. My mother, maybe ten or eleven, riding a pony in a Christmas parade, red ribbons in her braids. I reached for it with shaking hands. Her smile was mine.
I curled onto the old leather chair by the fireplace and let the silence press in. My chest ached—not with grief, exactly, but something more tangled. Like a door cracked open to a room I never knew existed, filled with untold stories and forgotten love.
***
That night, I couldn’t sleep.
I made peppermint tea and stood by the frosted window, watching the snow gather along the fence posts. I wrote in my journal, my pen skimming across the paper in jerky loops.
What am I even doing here? Was I just prolonging the inevitable? What would she say if she saw me—flailing through frozen mud and stubborn livestock and hopelessly tangled string lights? Would she laugh at my pathetic attempts? Or, somehow, would she be proud?
I fell asleep sometime after one, the tea cold at my elbow.
My dream was strange and sweet. I stood in a pasture that glowed like a postcard—sunset spilling gold over the hills.
My mother stood in the distance, wearing a denim jacket and red mittens, her hands cupped around her mouth as she called to me, her voice a faint, sweet echo on the wind.
I ran to her, my legs heavy, but the ground stretched endlessly before me, her shape growing smaller and more distant with each desperate step.
I shouted, tears blurring her image. She didn’t hear me.
And then snow began to fall, thick and sudden, a silent white curtain hiding everything, even her, from my view.
I woke up with tears on my cheeks.
The house was quiet. I wandered into the kitchen, desperate for something warm. As the coffee brewed, I heard a voice—low, rough. Max.
He was in the mudroom. The door was mostly shut, but I could hear him.
“…not sure we have another option. The repair costs alone…”
A pause.
“No, she doesn’t know yet. I’m not dropping it on her while she’s hanging lights and baking cookies.”
Another pause.
“Yeah. I could sell off the trailer and the spare plow. Maybe the second water tank. It’d buy us time. But not much.”
My stomach tightened, a cold knot of dread. “She deserves better than watching this place fall apart,” Max’s voice, rough with emotion, reached me through the crack.
The silence after that cut deep, a heavy, unspoken burden. I stepped back, my heart pounding a frantic rhythm against my ribs.
My hand brushed the cold counter, steadying myself as if the floor had tilted. I didn’t know what stung more—his quiet willingness to sell off pieces of this place he loved so much, or the crushing realization that he was doing it to protect me.
I turned and walked quietly back down the hall, the old boards creaking underfoot like whispers.
The ranch wasn’t just his burden anymore. It had never been just his. And maybe, deep down, it was meant to be mine all along.