So… distraction was the next best thing.
The scraggly pine tree was still where he’d left it in the barn earlier that day. He grabbed his coat off the hook by the door and shoved his feet into his boots without bothering with the laces. Outside, the night air bit at his lungs. The snow had stopped, but the cold had deepened, turning everythingbrittle. The stars above were so clear they looked like ice crystals suspended in black glass.
The barn door groaned open, hinges complaining about the cold. Inside was only marginally warmer, but at least the wind couldn’t reach him. He flipped on the single bare bulb hanging from the rafters. There wasn’t much in here yet. A few tools, some scavenged lumber, the tractor he’d bought used from a rancher down in Sula. And the tree.
He’d picked it up on impulse. A seven-foot Douglas fir, one side flattened from growing too close to a fence, the other sparse enough that he could count the branch clusters. It wasn’t much of a Christmas tree, but it was better than nothing.
Back in the main house, Walker dragged the tree through the door and stood it up in the corner of the living room where it would be most visible from the kitchen and the front door. He found a five-gallon bucket, filled it with rocks from outside, and wedged the trunk into it. Not pretty, but it would hold.
The box of decorations had come from Wilder Way Antiques in town. Mismatched glass balls, a few strands of lights that might or might not work, and a mess of tinsel that looked like it had been stored in someone’s basement since the Reagan administration. It was probably stupid to put up a tree when Christmas was two days away.
He tested the lights. Half the strand worked; the other half was dead. Story of his life, really. He wrapped the functional part around the tree’s better side, then stepped back. It looks… sad. He hadn’t decorated a tree since Stella was seven years old.
The memory hit him with unexpected force—Stella standing on a kitchen chair in their old apartment, her small hands carefully placing a paper star she’d made at school on the highest branch she could reach. “Daddy, is it straight?” she’d asked, her face scrunched with concentration.
“Perfect, Stell-Bell,” he’d told her, even though it was tilting to one side. She’d beamed at him, gap-toothed and radiant.
They’d had a tradition: one new ornament every year. Something that represented what she was into that Christmas. A tiny ballet slipper when she was six. A plastic horse the year she was obsessed with riding lessons. A miniature book when she started reading chapter books on her own.
Walker rubbed a hand over his face. The stubble rasped against his palm. Stella would be twenty now, all grown up. Did she still put up a Christmas tree with her mother? Did she still hang those childhood ornaments, or had they been relegated to a box in some storage unit, along with any memories of him?
He picked up a faded glass ball, red with gold flecks embedded in the surface.
Why was he even doing this? It wasn’t like Boone was some kid who’d wake up Christmas morning looking for presents. The man was approaching thirty, with a criminal record and a mother who didn’t recognize him half the time. What the hell was a Christmas tree going to do for him?
But Walker kept at it, hanging the glass ornaments one by one, spacing them as best he could to hide the tree’s worst gaps.
The truth was, it wasn’t really about Boone. Johanna would probably say it was about proving something to himself. That this place could be more than a halfway house or a work camp. That it could be a home.
He unwrapped a small wooden ornament, a hand-carved horse with a broken leg. Someone had glued it back on, not quite straight, and it reminded him of his daughter. His eyes stung as he hung it near the top where it would catch the light.
The floorboards creaked behind him, and he turned to find Johanna standing in the kitchen doorway, her hair loosearound her shoulders, snowflakes melting in the dark strands. She wore a thick sweater and jacket over what looked like pajama pants, her feet in wool socks. Her cheeks were flushed, either from sleep or the cold.
“Couldn’t sleep?” she asked.
“Never can.”
She nodded, looking past him to the half-decorated tree. “That’s like Charlie Brown’s tree.”
He stepped back from the tree and studied it. “It’s not that bad.”
“It’s worse,” she said, but there was a soft smile playing at her lips. She moved closer, arms crossed against the chill. “Why are you decorating a tree at two in the morning?”
He shrugged, turning back to the box of ornaments. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Most things do at two a.m. Mind if I help?”
He motioned to the box of decorations. “Have at it.”
Johanna picked up a tarnished silver bell and turned it in her fingers. The small ping as she flicked it echoed in the quiet room. “I used to love decorating the tree as a kid. My mom had these ancient glass ornaments from Germany. I wasn’t allowed to touch them until I was twelve.”
Of all the ways he’d imagined this night going, Johanna voluntarily spending time with him hadn’t been anywhere on his list.
They worked in silence for a while, each taking ornaments from the box and finding places on the tree. The quiet between them was comfortable in a way Walker hadn’t expected. They’d always had that, even in the worst times. The ability to be silent together without it feeling wrong.
“My brothers used to fight over who got to put the star on top,” Johanna said finally. “Mom had to start a rotation system.”
Walker glanced at her. “We never had a real tree. Armybrat, you know. We moved too much. Dad brought home a plastic one when I was seven. Same one every year after that.”
