She frowned. “It can’t be.” The plastic cover of the photo album was translucent with age. She slipped her fingers beneath to pull out the delicate photograph. A man stood, beaming, with his arm around a smiling woman. The woman, Julie remembered only in that vague way of familiarity when too much time had passed. But the man—he, she had seen recently, and he hadn’t been smiling.
Julie flipped the photo over to read Gram’s inscription on the back.Stan and Mary Miller.The date was from twelve years ago.
They could have been two different men, the one in the photo and the grouch she’d met only yesterday. Aside from the shape of the face and the colors of the eyes and hair, they were nothing alike. The Stan she had recently encountered had been grim. The lines in his face had been set in what looked like a permanent frown, not the laugh lines on the man in the photo. He looked a lot like Nolan in the old picture.
She felt for him. Maybe, like Nolan had said, the loss of his wife had wounded Stan deeply.
It had wounded Nolan too. And his father had only made it worse by destroying old memories. This picture didn’t have Nolan in it, but Julie kept it out when she returned the photo album to the box, all the same.
Maybe Nolan might want it.
* * *
With still nophone call and nothing in the house left to clean, Julie decided to take advantage of the day. Before coming to Pinecone Falls, she’d never thought she would have considered a winter day to be beautiful. In Boston, the cold, the slush, even the fresh snow was more like an invasion, a pest to wish away. Not so here.
The temperature had dropped since yesterday. The air smelled clean and fresh. Her breath fogged in front of her face, rising from the scarf she’d wrapped over her nose and mouth. With the sun shining, she didn’t mind the chill. The snow was a powder over a layer of ice and more, deeper snow. Each of her footsteps crunched. That steadycrunch, crunch, crunchwas the only thing, aside from the occasional bird call, that ruptured the silence.
She found herself relaxing as she wove in between the evergreen trees. Beneath them, even craning her neck up, she couldn’t see the tops dusted with snow. There were too many branches in the way. The pine needles formed a kind of cushion against the rest of the world, making her feel like she was wrapped in a warm blanket. With a woolen hat, mittens, and scarf, and the new boots protecting her feet, she could have walked for hours.
She didn’t know where she was headed until she found herself in front of a particularly broad tree. The bark was peeling, the lowest branches over her head. On the trunk, she found her initials. She reached out to run her mitten over the rudimentary letters, and the ones below hers.
The bark of a dog made her jump. She pulled her hand back and glanced in the direction of the sound, only to find Snowball sitting in a drift, wagging her tail and shedding powder into the air that caught the sunlight and sparkled. Nolan stood behind her, a hand on her collar.
He looked chagrined. “Sorry. You looked like you didn’t want to be disturbed.” He gave his dog a pointed look.
She looked extraordinarily pleased with herself. So much so that she stood and strained against Nolan’s hold on her collar in her attempt to reach Julie.
“It’s fine,” Julie found herself saying. “Let her go.”
Snowball bounded up to her immediately. Julie patted the dog on the head, but her gaze strayed to the tree again.
She heard Nolan’s steps crunching through the top layer of snow and felt when he stopped next to her. She pointed to the initials carved on the tree. “Gramps and I made those on one of my summer visits.”
“I think when you carve your initials into a tree, they’re supposed to be next to the boy you like, not your grandfather.”
He was close enough to touch. Julie shoved his shoulder, but it was playful. He staggered a step before catching his balance, grinning. Snowball, thinking they were playing, barked and raced off through the trees.
“I was eleven.” Despite her defensive tone, Julie was grinning too. It was a happy memory for her, one she’d almost forgotten.
And, since Gram was selling the inn, it was a memory she would once again lose.
No, that wasn’t true. Nolan’s family was taking over the inn, which must be to expand theirs. She could still book a room with them and come out to the forest to find this tree and remember.
But would it be the same?
“When did he die?” Nolan asked softly.
She glanced up at him. “You don’t know?”
He shook his head. “It must have been while I was in school.”
“He died just after I graduated high school. It was so rough on Gram.”
“Yeah,” Nolan said softly. “I get that.”
And he did. He was going through the same thing with his mom. Without thinking, Julie reached out and grabbed his hand. It was a bit awkward through their mittens, but she felt his fingers flex beneath hers.
“I’d forgotten that day in the forest until I saw the initials again.”
