Total pages in book: 39
Estimated words: 37164 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 186(@200wpm)___ 149(@250wpm)___ 124(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 37164 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 186(@200wpm)___ 149(@250wpm)___ 124(@300wpm)
I’m back in my car, driving toward the town square, a much smaller one mind you, because staying in the house any longer than I need to feels like drowning in familiar air.
I’ve spent the last twenty-four hours hiding, which is usually how I get through my time in Pineview. First it was the motel off Route 9, the one with the flickering vacancy sign and a carpet that smelled like industrial cleaner and I don’t even want to guess what else. That lasted all of twenty minutes, until my Aunt Carol found out and decided it was absolutely not happening.
Since then, I’ve been shacked up in the one decent rental Pineview has to offer. Exposed brick. Soft lighting. A chalkboard sign by the door that reads Welcome Home, like it’s in on some kind of joke.
Spoiler alert: it’s not.
I avoid the town square most times I’ve been back since everything happened.
I always do, because the square is where people run into each other. Where there’s nowhere to disappear to. Where faces come with history attached and names carry weight. It’s where people look at you a second too long, trying to place you not as you are, but as you were before.
Seeing people does something to me now. It drags grief up from wherever I’ve managed to shove it down and sets it right in the open, raw and insistent, stampeding over any and every emotion in its path. Every familiar face feels like a question I don’t have the energy to answer and every smile feels like it comes with an expectation.
Tonight, though, my car drives me here anyway, because silly drunk me is reckless, sentimental and apparently incapable of respecting boundaries I spent years building. Drunk me decided signing up for The Christmas Toy Drive was a good idea, the one thing I swore I would never do again after the last time it nearly broke me.
I don’t even remember signing up for it. Just a hazy recollection of a late night, probably too much wine, my mother’s name sitting heavy in my heart, and a sign-up form that felt like penance. Or nostalgia. Or self-sabotage.
Again, probably all three.
Sober me is now dealing with the consequences. A story I know all too well.
The square is where The Christmas Kindness Drive begins. Where the community center doors open. Where people gather and remember and expect you to feel something you’re not sure you can survive feeling, because grief doesn’t stay quiet in places like this.
The square is already alive when I pull in. Strings of white lights arc overhead, casting a soft glow over the ice rink where kids wobble and fall and laugh in uneven circles. Parents cluster near the edges, steaming mugs in hand, faces flushed from the cold and the quiet joy of watching something uncomplicated unfold. Christmas music hums from speakers strung between lampposts, the notes weaving through the crisp night air.
This is where everything used to begin. My stomach contorts into knots as soon as I step out of the car.
Someone bumps into me immediately.
“Oh…Savannah? Oh my God.”
Mrs. Donnelly’s hands are on my face before I can react, cool and familiar, like she’s checking to make sure I’m real and not a mirage.
“Look at you,” she says, smiling wide and searching. “All grown up.”
I smile because it’s easier than explaining what she’s really seeing. The years. The leaving. The way I came back just often enough to convince everyone I hadn’t fully disappeared. She’s a friend of my mother’s. They would grab tea together and often. She’s the kind of friend where time doesn’t exist, you simply pick right up where you left off, every time.
“Are you staying?” she digs in immediately, the way Pineview people do, as though the answer might shift the entire season.
“Just for a few days.”
She hums, unconvinced, eyes lingering on my face like she’s reading something I didn’t realize I was still writing. “That’s how it always starts.”
I promise coffee. Promise soon. Promise things I know how to leave vague. Then I escape, heart thudding, moving deeper into the square before I can talk myself out of it.
Pineview doesn’t ease you in. It waits.
And then—
There he is. I knew I would see him the second I stepped onto Main Street.
Erik Beaumont stands near the massive Christmas tree at the center of the square, one hand braced against the railing, the other gesturing as he laughs at something a kid in an oversized helmet says. The lights overhead catch in his hair, and dusts his shoulders with gold.
My breath stutters.
Erik was my constant once. A lifetime ago. He was my north star. The boy who knew where I was before I did. The one who sat beside me on the hood of his truck at eighteen, talking about futures we were too young to understand. He gave me many firsts. Some of them still flood my memory from time to time.