“Ha!” Eamon laughed. “Come to think of it, you do. He had blue eyes too, though not as pretty as yours.”
That pleased me far more than it should have. “Thank you. What else does your cooking repertoire consist of?”
Eamon shrugged. “The basics. Stews, soups, a hundred ways to make potatoes, obviously. But nothing like my ma. She could make anything taste good, even when we barely had two ingredients to work with.” His accent was slipping again, the way it did when he talked about his family. “Had to be creative when money was tight.”
“She sounds amazing.”
“She was.” The past tense carried a weight of grief that made my chest ache for him. “She would’ve loved you, I think. Always said the mark of a good person was whether they could make people smile by walking into a room.”
The casual way he said it—like his mother loving me was a given, like he’d already imagined introducing us—made my heart do a little flip. “I would’ve loved to meet her.”
Eamon’s smile was soft but tinged with sadness. “She had this way of making everyone feel welcome. Could take one look at someone and know exactly what they needed—a hot meal, a kind word, someone to listen. Bit like you, actually.”
I felt heat rise in my cheeks. “I’m not that special.”
“You are though.” His green eyes were serious, intense. “You have no idea how special you are, Charles.”
The way he looked at me, like he was trying to memorize my face, made something flutter anxiously in my stomach. There was an undercurrent to his words that I didn’t understand, almost like he was saying goodbye. It made me ache inside in an almost unbearable way, and I couldn’t stand it.
“Let’s go outside,” I said, desperate to change the mood. “Look at all that snow. When’s the last time you built a snowman?”
Eamon blinked at the sudden topic change, then glanced toward the window where pristine white drifts sparkled in the morning sunlight. “A snowman?”
“Come on,” I said, standing and tugging his hand. I couldn’t resist singing, “Do you wanna build a snowman?”
Something shifted in his expression—that careful mask slipping to reveal something almost boyish underneath. “I haven’t built one since I was a child.”
“Then you’re overdue.” I was already moving toward our jackets hanging by the door. “The snow’s perfect for it—wet enough to pack but not too heavy.”
“Charles, it’s freezing out there?—”
“That’s what winter coats are for.” I tossed him his jacket and pulled on my own boots. “Besides, when’s the next time we’ll have snow this perfect and nowhere we need to be?”
That last part seemed to convince him. Within minutes, we were bundling up and heading outside into the crystal-clear morning air. The cold hit my lungs like a shock, sharp and clean and invigorating.
“Christ, it’s cold,” Eamon muttered, pulling his wool cap down over his ears.
“It’s perfect,” I corrected, scooping up a handful ofsnow and packing it into a ball. “Look how well it sticks together.”
I demonstrated by rolling the snowball across the ground, watching it grow larger as it picked up more snow. Eamon watched me with an expression of fond amusement, like he was observing some fascinating ritual he’d forgotten existed.
“You’re really serious about this,” he said.
“Dead serious. This is going to be the best snowman the Adirondacks have ever seen.” I looked up at him from where I was crouched beside my growing snowball. “Are you going to help, or are you just going to stand there looking pretty?”
That earned me a laugh—the real one that made his whole face light up. “Fine. But I draw the line at singing songs fromFrozen.”
“Deal.”
What followed was probably the most ridiculous hour I’d spent in years. We rolled three progressively smaller snowballs, arguing good-naturedly about proportions and placement. Eamon turned out to have surprisingly strong opinions about snowman architecture, insisting the middle section needed to be perfectly round, while I was more concerned with overall stability.
“It’s leaning to the left,” he observed as we heaved the head into place.
“It’s got character. Not everything has to be perfect.”
“Says the man who spent twenty minutes making sure the buttons were perfectly aligned.”
“Those are important! You can’t have a crooked-buttoned snowman.”
