Christmas at the Riverview Inn

“Stop!” Cameron said, but Max just kept hugging him and talking. Cameron could only stand there and take it.

“I’ll leave,” Max said. “Just come back inside. Alice is ready to burn the place down and Helen is crying. I’ll make myself scarce.”

Cameron slumped in the man’s embrace, enough that Max must have gotten the sense that Cameron wasn’t going to fight him anymore and let him go.

Cameron looked over Max’s shoulder at the inn. Alice was standing in the doorway. He could see how anxious she was. He could feel it, practically. She was the only mom he’d ever known, really. Anything good that grew in his life, he could trace the roots back to her.

To Max, too, in a lot of ways.

It wasn’t comfortable. But there it was.

“It just seems…”

“Like a lot?” Max finished.

Cameron huffed. “You guys are always a lot,” he said. “But this maybe…maybe it’s just too much. It’s Christmas, and I think I’m a bad memory—”

Max sucked in a breath. “I’m so sorry you think that.” He shook his head, and to Cameron’s total and utter shock the former cop seemed to be about to cry. “Because you’re not.”

“That night is,” Cameron said. He would not be put off by platitudes. He wanted to say Josie is in there crying. But he couldn’t even say her name.

Max shook his head, so sad. “Not…for the reasons you think. Everyone regrets what happened. All of us. And if you come in…”

“We’re going to be one big happy family?” Cameron asked.

“Yes.”

“I wasn’t part of the family, Max. I was an employee.”

“You were much more than that, Cameron. So much more. And even if you don’t remember that, I do. Alice does. Everyone in there does. Josie—”

Cameron lifted his hand and Max, thank god, shut his mouth.

Cameron glanced up at the tops of the trees, the slate-gray sky above them. There was going to be snow soon. He could smell it. Max had taught him that. How the air changed in advance of weather. It had felt, learning it, like a stupid thing. But in his life on the road it had become a superpower.

I owe them so much.

“It’s Christmas, son—”

“Stop,” Cameron said. “Stop. I’ll come in. I’ll stay for dinner. Past that…we’ll go meal by meal, okay?”

Max blinked back his tears. “Meal by meal sounds familiar.”

“But you don’t call me son. Not ever again.”

Max nodded solemnly, like he understood it was the price of the past.

Cameron reached down for his backpack, but Max got there first.

“Good god, no wonder Garth fell over. What do you keep in there?”

“My home,” Cameron said. Max looked at him like he was joking, but he wasn’t.

He’d lost the only home he’d ever had, really. The only family.

He lived his whole life now making sure he didn’t have another one to lose.

7

JOSIE

Her first season working as an intern for the show had been the kind of season where everything went wrong. And since it had been her first year, she’d had no perspective on it. Josie had thought that things like the set catching on fire, and the costume department going on strike, and a stomach flu—the kind that created explosive diarrhea—burning its way through the cast were all normal.

She’d met every problem with the grim determination to control it. The way she couldn’t control any other thing.

Every season after that first season had been easier—which might be a part of why she stayed.

The rest of the night that Cameron came back to the Riverview was like that. After the shock of seeing him, the painful gut-clenching reaction to his obvious inability to look her in the eye, it wasn’t so bad.

When he walked away from the table and grabbed his things, clearly leaving, it hadn’t even registered in the atmosphere of shock in her brain.

When he and Max walked back in like nothing was really wrong, she didn’t know what to feel.

Relief? Dread?

So she used the great coping mechanism she always used.

She worked.

She cleared the dishes the squirrel had upset. She brought out new place settings. New silverware. When the oven timer went off and fresh bread was baked, she took care of it. Brought it out, sliced and wrapped in the cloth napkins that fresh bread was always wrapped in here at the Riverview.

She filled water glasses.

“Sit,” Helen urged when Josie jumped up to go grab a bottle of wine. “I’ll get it.”

But Josie was already halfway to the kitchen.

The kitchen was still dark and quiet. The smell of the dinner Alice had worked so hard on lingered, and the pots and pans were piled up, waiting for whichever family members were on the clean-up crew to come in and take care of them and probably another bottle of wine. Or two.

They’d bring Cameron in here and make him sit at the counter and not lift a finger as he told them more stories about his travels.