Everyone told her in quiet voices that Alice didn’t blame her for Cameron leaving. But the way Alice looked at her said otherwise.
Not that dishes would do it—but it felt like a start.
The kitchen of the Riverview was the unofficial heart of the place and it had grown over the years, just as the inn had grown. Gabe used to have an office next to it, but the walls had been taken down to make room for a bigger industrial oven and dishwasher. The windows in the far corner revealed the jet-black night and the tiny pinpricks of stars over the mountains. Josie set the plates down on the stainless steel table where she’d tried and failed to learn how to bake. It was where she’d helped plan the area school lunches. It’s where she and Helen had eaten a million pieces of cold pizza and giggled about boys.
It’s where she’d fallen in love.
And had her heart broken.
Where is he? she’d asked the morning after her graduation. Sick to her stomach and shaky, and so humiliated her bones hurt. She couldn’t see straight. Alice had given her coffee, but it made everything worse.
He’s gone, Max had said.
Where?
We don’t know, Alice had snapped. Her eyes were red, too, and she was pissed. At Josie and Max.
Did you make him leave? she’d asked Max. Because of me?
No, Max had said. He…he left on his own.
Alice had made a noise in her throat and turned away, and Josie had bent over her legs but that hadn’t made anything better so she’d run to the back door and barely made it out onto the gravel before throwing up.
It’s not what you think, Max had said when he came out with a glass of water and a towel. He was sad, too. Everyone had been so fucking sad because she’d made some kind of horrible fool of herself and sexually assaulted her best friend.
Oh, she’d said sarcastically. That makes me feel better.
Honestly. Max had tried to put his arm around her, but she’d shrugged her whole body away, unable—absolutely unable maybe ever, ever again—to be touched. This is for the best, Josie. That’s what he said.
She’d blinked back the thick tears and looked at Max. He’d looked old in the sunshine. Tired.
He said that? she’d asked. She hadn’t remembered a bunch of the previous night—things were fuzzy, at best—but she remembered he’d kissed her back. He’d kissed her back like she mattered. Like she’d dreamed of being kissed for years. She couldn’t remember what they said to each other, but that was crystal clear.
But that had been just sex, maybe. That had just been a drunk girl throwing herself at a guy. And him catching her for a second before putting her aside.
He never loved me.
He never wanted me.
The previous day she would have sworn on her life that she and Cameron were soul mates.
She’d been disastrously wrong.
That’s what he said, Max had told her. It’s for the best.
Shaking off the memories she turned toward the second big fridge where the family kept their food. The fridge on the other side of the room was for the inn. Alice always said it was a bookkeeping thing, but everyone knew it was so no one ate her favorite cheese and the olives she liked, or the green apples she had every morning with her breakfast.
The kitchen was dark; the only light was from the moon and the lights in the dining room coming in through the open door, so it took Josie a second to realize what she was looking at on the front of the fridge.
Postcards. A dozen of them, at least.
Spain. Portugal. France. Nepal. Morocco.
And she knew without looking at them who they were from and who they were to. And it felt like an invasion of privacy to read them, but she couldn’t help herself. They were there. Right there on the fridge. They were meant to be read.
She picked up Greetings from Morocco and flipped it over.
Figs, Alice! Fresh yogurt from goats. Runny honey and black pepper. Breakfast of champs. Put it on the menu. Love Cameron
This was the closest she’d been to him since that night. Reading his name on a postcard.
Her heart pounded so hard, her whole body shook.
And she wanted to press her face to the card—to his handwriting—like a crazy woman. Like his smell might still be there. Like somehow she could feel him from so far and so many years away.
Fingers trembling, she put it back.
These messages weren’t for her; she knew that. It was an invasion of privacy. And salt in the wounds she’d caused everyone that night.
She picked up another one. Sweden.
There were two recipes on the back. One for cinnamon rolls with cloves and cardamom and the other for brined salmon.
I miss you was scrawled across the bottom.
Cameron had terrible handwriting. He always had. The notes he used to leave for her had been unreadable but she’d deciphered them like learning a foreign language. And being able to read his handwriting had felt like something special, like she’d cracked the code of him. Ridiculous, but when you’re a teenager and nursing unrequited love, you’ll cobble together a case for just about anything.
She replaced the card on the fridge and stepped back. There were twenty cards on the front and another thirty on the side.
London. Tokyo. Auckland. Beijing. Sao Paulo.
Each of them a recipe. Each of them a love letter from around the world to the woman who’d been a mother to him.
The woman he’d left behind.
Because of Josie. Because she’d been so stupid and pushed an issue that shouldn’t have been pushed and rather than jeopardize the family—he’d left.
The guilt that she’d managed by being far away and keeping herself busy and—if she was really being honest—shoving the memories as deep as they could go, now resurfaced and was heavier than it had ever been. Her knees buckled and she put her hand against the fridge, her pinky resting against a sheep’s nose on a postcard from New Zealand.
Cameron. I’m so sorry.
“Josie?”
Of course it was Alice behind her. Josie closed her eyes in grim defeat. The one person she simply couldn’t talk to right now.
This moment had been coming. She’d known it the second she read that email from Helen. It was the reason she’d had a heartbeat of hesitation before she said yes.
They had to talk, she and Alice.
She just couldn’t do it now. Not yet.
There were other people coming into the kitchen behind Alice. Josie heard Stella and Grandma Iris—but Alice told them to wait just a minute in the dining room.
Do this. You can do this. And smile!
Josie turned, her expression more a grimace than a smile, but she gave herself points for trying. Even though she knew the smile did not hide the tears standing in her eyes and the guilt she carried and the love she didn’t ever know what to do with in the absence of the person she most wanted to lavish it upon.
“Are you all right?” Alice asked. Alice wasn’t cold. To think she was cold was a pretty classic misconception about her. She was fierce and she was serious. And she did not throw her heart around easily. But once you were hers, you were hers.
Josie had just never been hers. Not the way Cameron had been.
Alice looked like that actress Winona Ryder, only perpetually caught in the nineties version of her. No one kept pixie haircuts, denim shirts, and Doc Martens alive quite like Alice. It was one of the more endearing things about her. She did not change.
It was also one of the more terrifying things about her.
And the morning after Josie’s birthday, Alice had said everything that happened wasn’t Josie’s fault.
But she’d been lying.
“I’m so sorry.” Josie had said it before and saying it again, so many years later, seemed ridiculous, but she didn’t know what else to say.
Alice looked out the window, her pale skin gleaming in the moonlight. She swallowed and swallowed again, but when she turned to Josie she was smiling.
> But the smile was a lie. Just like Josie’s smile. One of the two things they had in common.
“We should talk,” Alice said.
And Josie knew that was true. Part of her even wanted it. Closure all these years after the fact.
“Okay,” Josie said. “But not now.”
“No,” Alice agreed like she was happy for the respite. “Later.”
“Can I ask…?”
“What?”
“Is he all right?”
“Cameron?”
Oh. No one had said that name aloud in years. Not to her. “Yeah.”
“You haven’t…talked to him?”
Josie shook her head.
“Lately?” Alice asked.
I haven’t talked to him since that night. Seven years. I told him I loved him. I kissed him. He left.
“No,” she said. And that he hadn’t answered her texts or emails or reached out with his own, more than his leaving, told her everything she needed to know about his feelings for her.
Alice blinked like Josie had stunned her.
“Have you seen Five Questions?” Alice finally asked.
Five Questions was Cameron’s hybrid cooking/travel YouTube channel that had started four years ago in the most Cameron type way—he’d ask five questions every morning while making coffee no matter where he was or what he had available. Coffee on the sides of mountains, in remote villages, using that camping coffee maker she’d given him for his birthday. (The sight of that little thing had been like a knife to her heart.) Some days he asked strangers. Some days he asked himself, if no one was around. And if it had started bare-bones, in the last few years there’d been moments of poshness. He’d made coffee in a suite at the Ritz in Paris. In the kitchens of Buckingham Palace. At Jimmy Fallon’s home in The Hamptons. And it wasn’t just coffee anymore. He’d started making food from ancient recipes. Gnocchi from someone’s nonna in Sicily. Goat cheese from herders in Peru.
But always Five Questions. For himself. For his viewers. And his guests.
Originally, it had been strangers. Some days just himself. But for the last year he’d been pulling real guests.
Famous chefs. Not just the ones on The Food Network. But Michelin starred chefs. All out there learning something fundamental about their craft, or something luxurious or quirky. Answering five sometimes ridiculous, sometimes intrusive questions. The episode with Jose Andreas in Spain catching fish—when Cameron got seasick and Jose fell into the water—went viral.
Cameron and their old game and the coffeemaker she’d given him for this birthday were all something of a phenomenon.
Not that she stalked him on his YouTube channel. Except when she’d had too much to drink.
And on her birthday. And last Wednesday.
“I’ve seen it,” Josie said.
Alice smiled her razor’s edge smile, like she understood Josie downplaying it all.
“He’s good. He travels a lot. He was engaged for about a minute.”
Josie sucked in a breath. That shouldn’t hurt. Why did it hurt?
“But they never got married.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“He says it was for the best.”
It’s for the best. The four worst words in any language.
“He’s the same old Cameron, you know,” Alice said. “Stubborn. Creative. Works hard. But he’s different too. Relaxed a little. Like he doesn’t have to prove himself all the time.”
There was something laced in those words. A kind of benediction. Like she was telling Josie that Cameron’s leaving really had been for the best. Or, if not the best, had at least had a bright side.
“He stopped asking after you about a year after he left,” Alice said, stepping closer and then stopping, like she felt the force field Josie had up. “I thought maybe he got in touch with you.”
“No.” Josie managed a smile. “He just…” Forgot about me? “Moved on. Which, you know, is good.”
“Have you?” Alice asked, which frankly seemed like the dumbest question ever. Josie was standing in a dark kitchen in tears over some postcards that had nothing to do with her.
“Of course,” she said, and it wasn’t totally a lie.
Josie was saved from any more conversation by Grandma Iris walking in the door bearing an empty serving tray. Alice rushed to take it from Iris’s shaking hands. The cousins followed carrying dirty dishes. “Josie!” Stella said. “Do you think I could apply for that summer internship program at your network this year?”
“You need to be in college,” Josie said.
“Yeah, but aren’t there some strings you can pull?” Stella waggled her eyebrows and Josie shook her head, and as promised, the mayhem of the Mitchell family took the pressure off her and within a few minutes she found herself escaping the kitchen.
And the postcards.
It was too bad the boy who wrote them was not so easy to escape.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” Helen said, an hour later as she and Josie sat in the quiet of the lodge. Helen, holding her hand to her stomach, shifted and then shifted again, struggling to get comfortable on the leather couch in front of the fireplace that was, as a rule, the most comfortable piece of furniture ever made. Only pregnancy could make it uncomfortable. And Josie, sitting next to her on the same couch was getting tossed around like they were at sea by all of Helen’s shifting.
“Helen.” Josie laughed. “You made it very clear that if I wasn’t here this year for Christmas you were going to disown me.”
“I didn’t say that!” Helen cried.
“I read between the lines.”
“Well…enough is enough and all that. You should be here for Christmas, and if you didn’t come, you’d never see what a cute pregnant lady I am.”
“You are a very cute pregnant lady.”
“Right?” Helen asked, preening a little. And the girl had the right to preen.
“So, you and Evan?” Josie asked. “I guess it’s for real now.”
Helen smiled. She and Evan had always been for real, from the second they met at university in Boston. Peas and Carrots, Grandma Iris had called them. Which was the highest compliment a couple could be given in Iris speak.
“I can’t believe you haven’t been back to the Riverview in five years.”
“Me neither, really,” Josie said.
“What do you do at Christmas?”
“Work.”
“You’re joking.”
“Nope. I have to work while I’m here. We’re casting for the new season. It’s actually a really busy time of year.” They were still creating a new season of I Do/I Don’t and hopefully transitioning to her new idea next year.
“You really are a big deal,” Helen said, nudging Josie’s shoulder and grinning. “Hotshot.”
“Hardly.”
“You must make a shit ton of money.”
“Are you going to ask for another donation?” Josie pretended to tease. Donating to Helen’s cause was literally the least she could do.
“No. But…” Helen sighed. “I love my job and I believe in it, but with the kid coming I think either Evan or I need to get something that earns a little more or is a little bit more stable.”
“You know the family will support you.”
Helen nodded, but stared off into the flames, her hand over her stomach. That was the funny thing about a family like the Mitchells. They could make it real comfortable to rely on them.
To stay, even. To be a part of the legacy here rather than step outside and find something of your own.
It was tricky.
“It must be weird being here without Cameron,” Helen said.
Again that name. It hit like a smack and Josie couldn’t stop the flinch.
“Please,” she whispered. Helen was the only person she could admit this to, and even that felt like too much. “Don’t. I can do this, I can be here and I can even be happy, but if we talk about him…” She couldn’t actually finish the sentenc
e. Living with a mistake like the one she’d made required extreme compartmentalization. She had it squished down into a box, but the box was leaking and making a mess, and she was compensating for that box in a lot of different parts of her life, but it was closed.
And it was never—ever—opened.
“I need…to tell you something,” Helen said. Her tone was serious and Josie put a hand on Helen’s shoulder. They were cousins by marriage, but truly sisters at heart.
“What? Is everything all right?” Josie asked, alarmed by Helen’s sudden seriousness.
“Fine, but…I don’t want you to be surprised—”
“Hey girls.” It was Max, coming in from outside. A bitter December-in-the-Catskills wind blew in around him, making the flames in the fireplace dance and sputter. Snow dusted his hair and shoulders. “Snow’s coming down. You gonna bunk in the lodge tonight?”
“Slumber party?” Josie asked, wiggling her eyebrows. Max and Mom had built a cabin on the far side of the property, but for Josie, home was always going to be the bedroom she’d shared with her mother when they first moved here. The room she got to herself when Mom moved into Max’s room.
Helen sighed. “I can’t. I promised Mom we’d do some shopping in the morning. I need to head to the farm.”
She struggled to get to her feet and Josie stood up to help her.
“Oh my god, I’m a whale,” Helen joked.
“You are five months, Helen. And barely showing. You better start pacing yourself.”
Helen gasped in mock outrage.
Josie wrapped her arms around her. “Thanks for making me come home,” she whispered in Helen’s ear. “I’m glad I came.”
“So are we,” Helen said.
And Josie told herself not to say it, not to bring it up because it was pulling at the lid on that box she liked to pretend didn’t exist. But in this lodge, in this home that Alice and Gabe built for all of them, it was hard not to say it. It was the elephant in the room. “I don’t think Alice is happy I’m here.”
“Of course she is,” Helen whispered.
Yeah, it really didn’t feel like it.
“Come on girls,” Max said and then grinned. “Wow. Serious déjà vu.”
Christmas At The Riverview Inn Page 4