Christmas at the Riverview Inn

I’m not your employee anymore.

God, the words had been bullets right through his heart. But the look in Cameron’s eyes had been worse. All that distance Cameron and Josie were putting between themselves and the world. All that distance between themselves and love.

Max had some work to do. He was still the Family Officer for the county and Christmas was usually a time when kids got into trouble. No school to keep them occupied. Home lives in trouble. So he and Dante at the parole office had been trying to keep some of the most at-risk kids in the area busy. Delivering food. Shoveling sidewalks. The usual.

As he opened up his email, he remembered so clearly how he’d been desperate to do the same for Cameron. And how Cameron had fought and fought and fought…

Until he got tired. The way so many of those kids got tired. Of pretending they didn’t need love and boundaries and to use their bodies and brains and be respected for what they could do.

And then Alice had taken Cameron into the kitchen and it had been game over for the boy. He’d found himself, found something he cared about and someone to help him learn it.

And I took all of that away.

The guilt was a fresh hot spike in his chest.

Max and Dante exchanged emails regarding some shoveling they were planning to do in town in the next week and which kids they were going to get involved. He wondered if Cameron would be interested in helping out. After all those years of fighting Cameron was the first guy to sign up for these kinds of thing.

But then he wondered if Cameron would still be here in a week.

If he was still here now.

And suddenly he had an urgent need to know. To see the kid. To try, the way he hadn’t been able to the previous night, to repair what had gone so wrong between them.

He closed the laptop, left the rest of the coffee for when Delia woke up, and shrugged into his coat. It had been a long time since he’d been down at the lodge in the morning, but he found himself looking forward to it.

Alice’s bread, the black tar she pretended was coffee. The hum and business of the kitchens. Dad coming in to light the fires.

And Cameron.

Snow was falling, and so he skid a little when he braked at the stop sign. Turning on his right blinker, he saw the taillights to a van heading left down the road, toward Daphne and Jonah’s place.

“Shit,” he muttered, hoping he hadn’t missed his chance.

The snow was coming down hard, and when he parked in the back, where the van usually sat, the snow was already filling in its tracks. The air smelled cold and crackly, which usually meant they were going to get a real storm. Josie had used Delia’s truck to come down here at dawn, apparently, and he parked beside it.

In the time it took him to walk from the truck to the back door, snow had gathered in his hair. Along his jacket.

The warmth of the Riverview kitchen enveloped him the way it always did, like arms coming around him. The smell of coffee, lasagna, and bread didn’t hurt.

“If you’re looking for the kids you just missed them,” Alice said, wiping off the last of her big baking trays and putting it in the rack beside the oven.

“I’m guessing you mean Cameron and Josie?”

She smiled, one side of her mouth lifting as much with bitterness as with joy. “Coffee?”

“Sure.”

“Lasagna?”

“For breakfast?”

“Like you don’t want it.”

He pulled out one of the stools at the island and sat. Alice poured him a cup and brought him a slab of lasagna that practically hung over the edges of the plate. He picked up his fork but couldn’t quite find the will to eat it.

“You all right?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “ You?”

“I spent the morning cooking with Cameron. I didn’t think that would ever happen again.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t suppose you did.” They sat in silence.

“You have something you want to get off your chest?” she asked him.

“Do you?” he shot back.

She poured herself the last of the coffee and sat down at the island beside him.

“We handled that night all wrong,” he said. Alice nodded.

She swallowed, so clearly carrying such a load on her shoulders. He’d grown used to living with women after so many years of just him and his brother and dad, and he knew the therapeutic importance of hugs.

But Alice wasn’t a hugger.

He covered her hand with his and she immediately grabbed him, holding on tight.

“They loved each other.”

“I know.”

“A real and honest love.”

Shit. “I know.”

“And even if it never became anything more, they deserved a chance to have that first real love. That first love is how you learn to love. And how you learn who you are in love. And how to live inside it. And we…we took that away from them.”