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We are warm.
We have food.
No. She felt nothing but numb and defeated.
Still, it was good to know that at least she wasn’t the only one who had made a stupid decision to drive in this weather.
“Were you two on your way to spend Christmas with family?”
“Oh, we’re not together,” the girl said quickly. “I mean, we’re together, obviously. We were in the car together, but we’re not together, together. We’re colleagues. We were working. Not anything else.” The streak of pink that appeared on her cheeks made Brooke wonder if she would, in fact, have liked their relationship to be something else. There was a crackle of tension in the air, although that could have been down to the current situation. Brooke was feeling plenty of tension herself.
“Working?” Matt removed a lump of snow from his neck. “You work near here?”
“Not exactly. The office is in Boston, but we have a client nearby so we’ve been going back and forth on a fairly regular basis for the past couple of months. We were at the end of the project so last night we stayed in a cute inn.” Izzy turned to Mabel. “I love your house. Every time we drove past it I tried to imagine who might be lucky enough to live here.”
“He must be an important client if you felt you had to drive in this,” Matt said, and Izzy nodded.
“He is, but believe me there’s no way I would have chosen to be on the roads if I’d been in charge of the decision. Blame my boss. He wanted the job done by Christmas, come hail, rain or nor’-easter, and I’m too low in the food chain to have a voice anyone will listen to.”
Matt raised an eyebrow. “He considers his staff to be expendable?”
“It would seem that way. A part of me hopes my boss is currently worrying and feeling guilty, but honestly, I doubt he has given my welfare a second thought. He’s probably already home with his family trimming the tree.” She flexed her fingers, trying to bring the feeling back. “What happens now? I assume there’s no point in calling a tow truck?”
“No signal,” Matt said, “and even if we did get a signal, no one is coming out in this weather.”
Izzy gave a fatalistic shrug. “Then I suppose we have no choice but to wait until there’s a break in the storm and then see if the cars are still drivable.”
“I don’t think there’s going to be a break in the storm for a while,” Matt said. “We should probably all accept that and adapt our plans.”
“What do you mean, adapt our plans?” Brooke turned to look at him, aghast. She didn’t want to adapt anything. She’d spent weeks figuring out every detail. She’d planned everything down to the last item and the last second. Quite apart from the fact her parents would be stressed if she deviated from their arrangement, everything had been designed for a purpose. To create a perfect Christmas for the girls. There wasn’t a single part of her plan that could be sacrificed.
Her heart started to pound. “We have to get to my parents’ house, Matt. It’s Christmas Eve the day after tomorrow.”
“I know what day it is, Brooke.”
“The weather might clear in a few hours. Anything could happen.”
He let out a breath and shook his head. “You wouldn’t be saying that if you’d just been where I was.”
Izzy glanced between them, clearly not wanting to take sides. “It is pretty bad out there. I can’t see any of us driving anywhere for the foreseeable future—that’s assuming the cars are still drivable. And that’s hard to tell at the moment.”
Brooke felt a wash of despair. No. She wasn’t going to accept this.
“There must be something we can do.”
“What?” Matt turned to look at her, sympathy and frustration present in his gaze. “Do we ski? Find a snowmobile? Two seconds outside that front door was enough to convince me that we’re deluding ourselves if we think we’re going anywhere. The sooner we accept the situation, the better.”
“I’m not ready to give up. It’s Christmas, Matt. The girls are excited. We’ll shelter here for a few more hours if that’s okay with Mabel.” She turned to Mabel, who had contributed next to nothing to the conversation of the past few minutes. “I promise the children will be no trouble at all—”
“Mummy?” Elsie emerged from the kitchen holding tightly to her sister’s hand. “Poppy spilled the rest of her hot chocolate on the cat. It’s very sticky. I tried to wash him but he ran away really fast.”
“Not-A-Cat,” Poppy said firmly.
Brooke closed her eyes briefly. So much for no trouble at all. How was she going to occupy the girls in a house that clearly hadn’t seen a child in decades, if ever? She’d be on edge the whole time, waiting for the girls to spill something else, or break something, or say something that would make Brooke want to curl up and die.
She took a deep breath and gave Mabel a weak smile.
Her first priority was evidently to wash a cat.
