Coming Home For Christmas

Though the room was carpeted, the floor was still cold on his bare feet as he slid out of bed and walked to the window. Dawn was still a few hours away. The storm had dropped several more inches since midnight but it looked as if the winds had died down. With luck, crews had been hard at work in the early hours clearing the freeway and they could get on their way at first light.

Good. He wasn’t sure he could take another night, trapped in a hotel room with her.

“It’s still too early to take off again. We should try to catch a few more hours, then get an early start.”

“All right. I’m...sorry I woke you.”

He thought about telling her she’d been giving him sleepless nights for seven years but didn’t want to admit that to her.

“Good night,” he answered, then climbed back into bed, rolled to face the wall and tried to do the impossible—put her out of his mind long enough to slip back into sleep.

Chapter Five (#u6f2a8054-74a2-5c8b-854c-89d0406f3f48)

Had he fallen back asleep? When she looked under her lashes at the form in the bed next to her, Elizabeth couldn’t really tell. Luke gave every indication that he was sleeping. He didn’t move a muscle and his breathing was even and steady.

She couldn’t return to sleep, maybe because she had dozed so much the afternoon before and then had gone to bed earlier than usual after Luke left, simply because she didn’t know what else to do.

Now, in the aftermath of what she knew was probably a small seizure, the fragments of the nightmare stayed with her, stark and terrifying. Not a nightmare. More memories that she had managed to shove down.

Driving through the storm the day before had brought back a plethora of things she had avoided facing. Her helplessness, regret, fear. And the long hard journey she had traveled since leaving Haven Point.

She shifted on the bed, watching the play of red and green on the wall from the Christmas lights hanging on the exterior of the hotel.

She knew nothing good came from hashing and rehashing the past. She had learned grim lessons from that journey. Right now, she had to focus on how she was going to make it through the next few days.

At least she would be able to see her children. Maybe even hug them. If the price for that glorious gift was time spent with a man who hated her, she was more than willing to pay for it.

“Yes, the interstate is open now. But I would still stay put if I were you.”

The highway patrol officer at the checkpoint before the freeway entrance looked cold and exhausted, with rosy cheeks, bleary eyes and heavy lines pulling down the corners of his mouth as he spoke. “This is the safest place for you, at least for a few hours. The roads might be open but they’re still slick and snow-packed.”

“Even on the interstate?” Luke asked.

“After the storm came a nasty fog that’s socked in everything from here to Boise. It will be at least noon before we can advise travel again for anything except emergencies. I know it’s an inconvenience, but it’s only a handful of hours.”

Luke’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. He didn’t look at her but awareness still seethed between them.

He didn’t want to wait another few hours to be rid of her.

He didn’t have to say the words for her to know what was going through his mind. She knew she had earned every ounce of his scorn, though that did not make it any easier to bear.

“I appreciate the advice, sir, but I’m sure we’ll be fine. We have four-wheel drive and I put the chains on this morning. We’ll go slow.”

The patrolman shook his head. “I can’t stop you since the roads are open. I tried to warn you. Just remember that.”

After that ominous warning, Luke nodded, waved at the man, then pulled slowly away from the checkpoint and onto the freeway.

They proceeded much as the officer had warned, at a slow pace, though it seemed conditions were better than she had feared. While there were certainly pockets of fog, they lifted for long stretches of time, revealing a pristine white landscape that made her grateful for her sunglasses.

She tried to make conversation at random intervals, but Luke shut her off every time with terse, monosyllabic answers. Eventually she tired of fighting the silent treatment and reached into her bag for a novel.

She had never been much of a reader, always too busy playing with friends or helping her dad out in the garden. Months of forced inactivity and the long tedium of a recovery with little else to do had introduced her to the sheer joy of losing herself in a story, reading about someone else’s troubles and triumphs instead of dwelling on her own all the time.

This book was fascinating and well written, and she was able to immerse herself in the story, grateful for the diversion from the tension, until Luke stopped for gas again near the Idaho border.

She got out to stretch her tight, aching leg and limped into the convenience store to use the facilities, then bought another protein bar and an apple.

She wasn’t inside long, but when she returned, Luke was already sitting behind the wheel, ready to go. The man could be a machine sometimes. He didn’t even seem to need so much as a cup of coffee to keep him going.

“We made...better time than I expected,” she said when they were on the road again.

“Still too slow,” he said. “But I’m glad we didn’t hang around at the inn.”

He didn’t seem inclined to say more and Elizabeth sighed. She tried to return to her book but increasingly felt her attention wandering.

She had so many questions she wanted to ask him. About the children, about his construction business, about the community she had once loved. He didn’t want questions from her. He didn’t want anything.

A lump rose in her throat at the sobering realization, but she swallowed it down along with a bite of her protein bar.

While she didn’t feel particularly tired, the tedium and her restless night—added to the extra medication she had taken to make sure she didn’t have another seizure—eventually caught up with her.

After she found her attention wandering away from the story and realized she couldn’t remember what she was reading, she moved her bookmark back to the previous chapter heading, closed her book and created a makeshift pillow out of her coat. She didn’t expect to sleep—Haven Point was only a few hours away, after all. Yet one moment she was watching the lines go by outside the windshield, the next she had escaped into her dreams.

She wasn’t sure how long she was out of it. When she awoke, the trees and mountains on either side of the road began to seem familiar. She knew this landscape, had seen it from the time she and her parents moved here when she was ten.

They were close to Haven Point. Her heart started to pound and her hands felt sweaty. Oh Lord. She couldn’t do this.

Luke seemed to become more grim and foreboding the closer they traveled to their hometown. His jaw looked hard enough now to slice through granite.

“I’m...sorry I fell asleep.”

He glanced over, his eyes as hard as the rest of him. “It was fine. The fog lifted right after you fell asleep. It hasn’t been a bad drive since then.”

She turned her attention out the window, catching glimpses of the pure blue of the lake through the trees as they neared it.

She loved that lake as much as she hated it. Yes, it had brought her joy through her childhood. She had wonderful memories of picnics by the shore, swimming at the beach near downtown, kayaking with her girlfriends in high school.

But it had taken so much from her.

Every mile seemed to contain more memories, not only of Luke but of her parents. Her childhood had been filled with joy, with parents who adored each other and her from the moment she was born, in stark contrast to what Luke endured.

Whenever she thought about the few things he had revealed about his childhood, she wanted to cry. Those memories had come back to her slowly, probably because they were so painful. She remembered he hadn’t wanted to tell her anything, preferring to focus on the present and about the future they wanted to build rather than his heartbreaking past.

His sister had revealed more. Megan had been the one to tell Elizabeth about their brute of a father, his drunken rages, his abuse and how he had singled out Luke for the worst of it.

Her husband would not have been happy with his sister for telling her that. He had only told her that his relationship with his father had not been a good one.

Like so many other things, Luke had shoved down his deepest emotions. He tried so hard not to show anger but sometimes that had translated into burying everything so deep, it was hard to bring anything out. Joy, happiness, love. She knew he felt those things, but during their marriage, he had struggled to show them.