Chapter Five – Doreen
Should she wear the burgundy sweater?
Urgh! Why was this so hard? It was only dinner with Sorcha and Christopher. Okay, so she hadn’t met Christopher yet… But she knew that wasn’t the reason she was taking so long to decide what to wear.
It went deeper than that. If she chose the burgundy sweater because of James, she was choosing to hope. And that felt unfamiliar and uncertain.
Doreen reached for the burgundy sweater and held it up against her body, studying her reflection in the small mirror propped on the dresser. The color brought warmth to her complexion, highlighting the honey tones in her hair. But was it too much?
With a sigh, she laid it back down on the bed. This was ridiculous.
“It’s just dinner, not a date,” she muttered to herself. But even as she said the words, James’s face floated into her mind, where it seemed to have taken up permanent residence.
Well, she’d have to evict it! At least until she was sure she wasn’t misreading his signals.
If he was even giving signals. She was so out of practice at this, and that scared her.
She squeezed her eyes shut, willing the memory away—but all it did was sharpen. The way his eyes had warmed when he looked at her. The way his voice had softened around Jake. The way her pulse had quickened, reminding her heart of something it hadn’t felt in years.
It was infuriating…and far too tempting.
She grabbed her hairbrush and dragged it through her hair, hoping the familiar ritual would settle her nerves.
It didn’t. Her hands still trembled as she uncapped her lip balm and applied it with editor-like precision, the same focus she’d give a comma splice or dangling modifier.
She dabbed at the corners of her mouth, trying to ignore the slight shake in her fingers.
With a frustrated exhale, she tossed the lip balm onto the dresser and turned away from her reflection.
The sweater still lay on the bed, waiting.
“This is absurd,” she muttered. “You’re a grown woman. Put on the sweater and go to dinner with your friend.”
Taking her own advice, she slipped it over her head, adjusting the soft folds until they draped just right.
As she smoothed it down over her hips, a strange flutter rose in her chest, like a bird testing its wings after a long winter.
The sensation was so unexpected, so foreign after years of careful emotional containment, that she pressed her hand against her heart, as if to capture the feeling before it flew away.
For so long, she’d convinced herself it was safer to be alone, to shy away from romance. From love.
She’d built thick walls around herself. Walls of solid stone to protect her sore, bruised heart. And yet one unexpected smile from a man she barely knew had slipped through a crack she hadn’t even realized was there. It was reckless. Dangerous. And unbearably hopeful.
“Jake!” she called, her voice steadier than she felt as she took one last look in the mirror and grabbed her purse. “Time to go!”
“Coming!” Jake shouted as he and Bash spilled out of his bedroom, skidding along the hallway toward the front door. Jake plopped down on the floor and tugged on his boots while Bash wagged his tail in frantic encouragement. The moment the boots were on, Jake sprang upright and grabbed his coat.
Doreen smothered a smile as she slid her feet into her warm winter boots. She hadn’t even managed to reach for her coat yet when Jake pushed open the front door and bounded onto the porch with Bash at his heels.
“Jake! Wait!” she called, hastily grabbing her coat from the hook. “It’s freezing out there!”
But her nephew was already bouncing on the porch, his breath puffing into tiny clouds in the crisp night air. Bash circled him in delighted loops, golden fur gleaming under the porch light, tail wagging with uncontainable joy.
Doreen shrugged into her coat, tugging it closed over the burgundy sweater, then locked the cabin door behind her and double-checked the handle out of habit more than necessity.
“Look at all the stars, Aunt D!” Jake pointed upward, his face alight with wonder. “There’s like a million of them!”
Doreen followed his gaze. The night sky stretched above them, impossibly vast and clear, stars scattered across it like handfuls of glitter tossed into the dark.
A breath caught in her chest. Out here, the sky felt closer, as if each star leaned down to whisper that she was allowed to want things again. Allowed to dream beyond survival. Allowed to step into a life that felt bigger than the one she’d boxed herself into.
“Wow.” There was no other word to describe it. The sight of them made her feel humble, a tiny fragment of something much, much bigger.
But she didn’t have time to ponder further before Jake and Bash were on the move once more.
“Come on, Aunt D! We’re gonna be late!” Jake shouted, leaping off the porch and landing with both feet in a pristine patch of snow, creating perfect boot prints that he immediately began to exaggerate, taking giant steps that left monster-sized tracks.
Bash circled him in delirious loops, barking joyfully at the snow that flew up around Jake’s boots.
“Leash,” she reminded Jake.
“Come on, Bash, no chasing squirrels tonight.” Jake leaned down and clipped the leash to Bash’s collar. “Good boy!” Then they were off again, with Jake balling up snow before throwing it in the air for Bash to catch.
Doreen chuckled as she crossed the porch with some care. Although the porch and the paths around the cabins had been gritted, there was still plenty of ice to slip on. Now, that would not be a good omen for the evening.
She followed behind Jake and Bash, making sure she kept out of the range of the snowballs.
As the pair got further ahead, she took a moment to absorb her surroundings. The forest around them was impossibly quiet, sound muffled by the blanket of snow. Even Bash’s excited barks seemed to fade quickly into the stillness.
Then, James was back inside her head. Would he be there already?
Stop it, she scolded herself. It didn’t matter if he was. There was nothing between them other than her own fanciful thoughts.
But her traitorous mind replayed the moment their eyes had met, the way his gaze had lingered on her face. She could almost feel it like a lover’s caress.
It doesn’t matter, she told herself firmly. You’re only here for a short visit. A holiday fling is the last thing you need.
But her heart had other ideas. It said this was exactly what she needed.
The cold air bit at her cheeks, but underneath her coat she felt warm, almost too warm. It had been years since a man’s attention—real or imagined—had stirred anything but self-doubt in her. The sensation was thrilling… and terrifying.
What if she was misreading everything? What if wanting something…someone…again only led to disappointment?
Her heart had been wrong before. Spectacularly wrong. And the fallout had nearly hollowed her out. She wasn’t sure she had it in her to survive another mistake. But hope, stubborn thing that it was, pressed insistently against her ribs as if begging for one more chance.
“Jake!” she called, quickening her pace as he and Bash veered toward a stand of trees. “Stay where I can see you!”
Jake pivoted mid-stride, his face flushed with cold and excitement. “But Aunt D, I think I saw a rabbit track! Can’t Bash and I just…”
“Not now,” she said, catching up to him. “We don’t want to be late, remember?”
“Okay,” he agreed, falling into step beside her, though his eyes still darted toward the tree line.
“Bash loves the special spot I made for him by the window. Do you think Deputy Pike will show me how to make that whistle sound tomorrow? He said golden retrievers are smart, but they need con-sis-tent guidance. That means you have to tell them the same thing every time so they don’t get confused. ”
Doreen laughed out loud. Jake’s enthusiasm was contagious, his rapid-fire observations jumping from topic to topic without pause for breath.
“I’m sure he’ll show you,” she said, reaching out to steady him when he slipped on a patch of ice. “Careful there.”
“And did you know he has a special police whistle? He said he could practice the commands with Bash every day. Do you think Bash will learn to sit better? He only sits sometimes when I tell him to.”
As Jake chattered on, Doreen felt some of the tension ease from her shoulders. His endless stream of facts and questions was the perfect distraction from her own tangled thoughts.
“Bash! No!” she called sharply as the golden retriever lunged toward a rustling in the underbrush. She caught his collar just in time and pulled him back onto the path. “No squirrels tonight.”
“I would have looked like I had been dragged through a bush forward,” Jake said. “Do you get it? Forward. Not backward!”
“I do get it,” Doreen said, giggling as she ruffled Jake’s hair.
They rounded the final bend in the path, and Sorcha and Christopher’s cabin came into view.
Warm golden light spilled from every window, and smoke curled from the chimney into the darkening sky.
It looked like something from a Christmas card, with its colorful string lights and a holly wreath hung on the door.
Then, her attention switched to the truck parked outside. James’s truck.
Heat stirred low in her stomach, a soft, traitorous bloom of anticipation. She told herself it was nothing—just nerves, just the cold, just everything except what it truly was: the thrill of knowing he might be only a few steps away.
Doreen paused for just a moment, tugging the sweater straight beneath her coat. She smoothed her hair once more, suddenly aware of her racing pulse.
Just dinner, she reminded herself. Just friends.
Yet she could not ignore the feeling that she was standing on the edge of something vast and unfamiliar.
Jake and Bash bounded ahead, leaping up the porch steps to knock on the wooden door.