Chance lifts a photo. “Is this Everett on the?—”
“Oh God—nope nope nope absolutely not?—”
I slap it out of his hand so fast the snowmen behind the glass rattle.
Holly softens. I know that look. Pity wrapped in girl-code solidarity. “Sierra, it’s okay. These… they’re honestly beautiful.”
They are not beautiful. They are incriminating.
They are every secret I buried behind this display case like an idiot teenager who thought a faulty panel could hide heartbreak.
Footsteps echo behind us. Heavy, steady, familiar.
Shit.
“Hide them, hide them, hide them—he’s coming—HIDE EVERYTHING!”
Chance doesn't ask a single question—king behavior—he just starts stuffing fistfuls of my history into pockets designed for tools, camping gear, and apparently now, emotional emergencies.
Holly helps, slapping clippings against his thighs like she’s wallpapering him in my emotional trauma.
“He can’t see these.”
My voice cracks.
“I never meant for anyone?—”
The last photo vanishes just as Everett steps up behind us.
“Never meant what?”
Holly jumps in. “Snowmen! Just… cleaning the snowmen. Free labor. They need better lighting. Maybe relocation.”
And there goes another new sound I’ve never made before.
“That’s the plan,” Everett says, oblivious as ever.
Because of course. Why notice me imploding when he can bulldoze through the one part of this lodge I still have a pulse in?
“That whole section changes this coming spring as long as I don't hit any roadblocks,” he says, smirking like he hasn’t just dropped a wrecking ball through my last emotional safe house.
Chance’s pocket crinkles earning a love tap from Holly’s elbow. A tap that has him wheezing.
My stomach drops. “What do you mean changes?”
“Fill in the window. Add a second bar.” He tugs on the warped panel where my secrets hid just moments earlier.
“No.” One word. Low, controlled, but edged with something territorial.
“What do you mean, no?”
“That section is historically significant,” I say, with the restraint of someone holding back violence.
It was everything. My sanctuary. My hiding place. My stupid, self-inflicted crucible.
It’s where I learned my first lesson about perfectlighting from my mother. And where Grammie Bea built on that foundation after she died.
It’s where I learned to love him quietly because loving him loudly would’ve cost me everything.
