ONE
DAHLIA
By the time I turn off the highway and onto the snow-packed road that leads into the town I used to call home, my fingers are cramped around the steering wheel.
“You’ll be fine. Everything is going to be fine,” I mutter to myself. “It’s just home.”
Except it hasn’t been home in a long time. Not really.
I’m just coming home from Christmas. It’s no big deal.
It just feels like a big deal because of certain… recent events.
The welcome sign looms ahead. It’s the same hand-painted mountains and spruce trees with the same cheerful slogan about adventure calling. Someone has added a string of battery-operated lights around the edges so the whole thing blinks red and green.
It’s adorable in a painfully earnest way this town has always specialized in.
My throat tightens anyway.
I left this place with my entire life crammed into the back of a hatchback and a promise that I was never coming back for morethan a quick visit. Then years went by where I didn’t come back at all.
It was easier to send gifts, excuses, and carefully cropped photos than to stand here and feel like the girl who never seemed to fit.
But when Molly called last week sounding completely exhausted, the words tripping over each other as she said things like “I’m fine” and “I’m just tired” and “we already promised both sides of the family we’d host,” I heard the truth in her voice.
She needed me.
So here I am, rattling into town with a trunk full of presents, my suitcase, and exactly zero idea what I’m doing with my life.
Molly’s little A-frame house sits at the end of a cul-de-sac looking like it belongs in a Hallmark movie. Every roofline is trimmed with twinkle lights. Someone has a blow-up penguin in a scarf waving cheerfully in the middle of their yard. There’s a fresh coating of snow that muffles the crunch of my tires as I pull up in front of my sister’s place.
Her porch light clicks on. The front door opens before I even shut off the engine.
Molly steps out onto the porch, wrapped in an oversized sweater and leggings, her pale green eyes framed by dark half-moons. She looks exactly like herself and not like herself at the same time.
I shove the car into park and climb out, the cold air cutting through my travel-stale clothes.
“You look like a Christmas marshmallow in all that,” she says, opening her arms.
“You look like you haven’t slept since July.”
“It feels like it sometimes.”
I cross the shoveled walkway and hug her tight. She feels smaller, bonier under my arms, and for a second I want to shake her and then wrap her in bubble wrap.
She squeezes me back, then leans away to study my face. “You made it.”
“Of course I made it.” I try for breezy. “Did you really think I was going to miss watching you orchestrate the Great Christmas Peace Summit?”
“That is not what we’re calling it.”
“We should. It sounds more impressive than ‘everyone’s coming and half of them barely speak to the other half.’”
She winces. “You’re not wrong.”
Inside, her house smells like pine and cinnamon and the faint trace of whatever candle she forgot to blow out. The tree in the corner is lit but undecorated.
The rest of the living room looks like the aftermath of a tinsel bomb.
