“Yeah.”
“It looks… small.”
“It is.”
“But good.”
“Yeah. Good.”
She stares. “I see why Emma loved it here.”
My shoulders tense.
“I’ve been thinking about your sister.”
I clench my teeth. “Don’t have to.”
“I want to.” Holly turns to me. “She loved Christmas, didn’t she?”
The question cuts clean.
I stop walking. Holly stops too, and places her hand on my arm.
“Yeah,” I say. “She did. Decorations, music, cookies. She decorated every inch of the cabin. Made me help. Drove me crazy.” I gesture toward the roof barely visible through the trees. “She was four years younger than me. I enlisted, and she stayed home. Married Beau, who’s good people. They talked about kids and building a life here.”
“And then?”
“Winter three years back. She was driving to town for supplies and called me from the road, laughing about a joke she’d heard at Eli’s store.” My voice goes hoarse. “She didn’t make it to town. Truck went off the ridge. I was in Seattle. Nothing important, just needed distance from the ridge for a few days. By the time I got back, she was gone.”
Holly’s hand tightens on my arm.
“I was supposed to be here.” The words come faster now, three years of guilt compressed into sentences. “Emma asked me to stick around that week. Said she wanted to tell me some news in person. But I left anyway because I thought I needed space. And while I was gone, she died alone on a mountain road I’ve driven a thousand times. A road I could’ve driven for her if I’d just stayed.”
“Cole, that’s not?—”
“I know. Logically, I know. But it doesn’t change the fact that she asked me to be here and I wasn’t. Or that I came back to an empty cabin and a box of ornaments I couldn’t look at without breaking.”
Holly steps closer. “You can’t carry the blame for ice and bad timing. That’s not how responsibility works.”
“Tell that to my head at three a.m.”
She doesn’t have an answer for that. No one does.
The wind picks up, sending snow cascading from the branches above us in a soft rush.
“Thank you,” she says, “for trusting me with her memory. For letting me be part of… this.”
I force myself to breathe. “We should head back. The next system’s coming.”
She nods and lets go. We turn toward the cabin.
Holly steps in my tracks without hesitation. She doesn’t reach for me again.
I miss the contact.
Inside, I strip off the layers and hang everything to dry. Holly does the same. Her cheeks are flushed pink. Hair escapes her braid in soft curls.
“That was perfect,” she says. “Thank you.”
