The girl and the unexpec.., p.1
The Girl and the Unexpected Gifts, page 1
The Girl and the Unexpected Gifts
Copyright © 2023 by A.J. Rivers
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Epilogue
Author's Note
Also by A.J. Rivers
Them
I have always loved snow globes.
The delicate glass. The sparkling snow. The perfection so finely crafted and preserved within. The tiny house and imagining how beautiful it was inside. The cozy warmth and the scent of sweets and cinnamon. The trees delicately dusted with perpetual snow, densely clustered together with the promise of a trail through them perfect for a romantic walk or a carriage ride. Or the glorious Christmas tree, exquisitely decorated with glowing lights and glittering details. I could lose myself staring into them.
But it seems that is always the way.
Losing yourself in perfection. Losing yourself for it.
I craved that kind of perfection. I stared into the one in my hand, wishing I could crawl through the fragile bubble of glass and feel the cold of the snowflakes on my face. I ran my fingertips along the smooth, cool surface wishing it would let me go inside and live in the peaceful beauty forever.
My snow globes aren’t just for Christmas. They stay on display throughout the year, reminding me that the ultimate beauty and pristine perfection can be just shards of shattered glass away.
The glittering new snow globe set aside, the distraction out of mind, it’s time to return to the unfinished project spread across the festive plastic tablecloth across the dining room table. Shimmering silver wrapping paper. The thick kind unfurled from a massive roll that seemed like it could last a lifetime, but seemed to disappear into the ephemera as piles of gifts appear beneath the tree. For now, only a few gifts were ready to be wrapped. With seasonal music playing in the background and the smell of hot cider mulling on the stove, it was a picturesque Christmas scene. Only the small smear of blood across the paper marred the perfection.
But that was gone with just the light swipe of a hand.
“Oh, good l—please be careful,” I say, holding my hands up as if I’m going to be able to catch Sam and Dean if they come tumbling down from the attic. “This. This right here is the exact reason I am so thankful this house was built like this. It’s treacherous enough with you coming down an actual set of stairs. Can you imagine if there was one of those ladders that comes down out of the ceiling?”
“Like the one at my parents’ house?” Sam calls out from behind the pile of boxes he’s trying to carry down without being able to see around them. “I used to get stuff down from there all the time.”
He takes a slightly unstable step and the already suspect structural integrity of the tower of boxes diminishes. He swerves to accommodate the tilt and makes it down the last couple of steps unscathed.
“See?”
I roll my eyes. “Yeah, well, you probably carried one box at a time, and if I know you as well as I think I do, you probably laid down on your stomach through the opening and dropped a lot of stuff down rather than carrying it all the way down the ladder.”
My husband shrugs. “It was efficient.”
Dean is trying the same feat Sam just accomplished and giving it just about the same performance. Too many boxes. Not enough visibility. He makes it down with a slightly more pronounced wobble than Sam and I hit a lunge with my hands above my head to catch a box labeled “holiday throw pillows” as it topples down so he doesn’t step into it, fall down the stairs, and ruin Christmas.
I tilt the box back and forth between my hands, examining it as I step out of the way so Dean can safely reach the bottom.
“This is a big box. I didn’t realize we had this many holiday-themed throw pillows,” I say.
“We didn’t. That’s why I put it up there,” Xavier says, coming down the stairs holding a tree topper in one hand and a cluster of giant plastic candy canes to line the sidewalk with the other.
“You put a box of pillows up in the attic just so we’d have to carry them down?” Sam asks.
“Yes. It’s Christmas tradition.”
“To hide pillows?” Sam asks, exasperated.
“To bring them down from the attic, Sam. How is the box going to start developing its Christmas storage smell if it isn’t in storage?” Xavier asks.
“We already have the Christmas tree up and decorated,” I say. “What’s with the extra topper?”
“I need one for the tree in my room,” he replies, walking around us and heading for the living room.
I look at Dean. “He has a tree in his room?”
“Apparently,” Dean says.
I really shouldn’t be all that surprised. This Christmas season hasn’t gotten off to the smoothest start, and without the traditions that mark transitions like fall to winter or Thanksgiving to Christmas, it throws Xavier off kilter. It may seem to many like he’s already that way, but once you get used to him, you realize Xavier has a state of normalcy just like everyone else, and like everyone else, he’s vulnerable to being knocked off track when that normalcy isn’t maintained. It is by no means the same kind of normalcy, but it’s his base level. Maintaining that base level can be a very delicate game sometimes, but others are much more obvious.
I knew this holiday season wasn’t going to be easy for him before Thanksgiving even rolled around. To Xavier, there is a very clear delineation between the seasons, and they should not bleed into each other. He goes to great lengths not to hear a single Christmas carol, eat Christmas-themed candy or chocolate, wrap a gift, or drink eggnog before Thanksgiving. It is still autumn, and the Thanksgiving holiday should be cherished as the time of thankfulness for the bounty of the harvest that it is, according to him. But come the time the dishes are put away and the dinner has been officially declared leftovers, the switch has been flipped and it is Christmas.
The seasonal pajamas come out, he pours a giant glass of eggnog, and it’s time to decorate the Christmas tree. Our entire extended chosen family, including my father, Bellamy, Eric, and little Bebe, are all together for the Thanksgiving holiday and then get to kick off the Christmas season together. It’s a streamlined process that gets him right from decorative corncobs and cornucopias to holly and stockings in an instant. Within the next couple of days the house will fill with the smell of gingerbread as he produces this year’s line of gingerbread men around the world.
I’ll admit, it’s become a treasured tradition for me as well. After many years of barely celebrating Christmas at all, I’ve gotten attached to the cozy, festive feeling of being here in Sherwood like I did when I was a child. Now the family I share the holidays with is larger and more complicated, but there’s something really special about our traditions and celebrations together. Even if I do have to be prepared for a razor-thin margin between the two holidays.
But this year, it hasn’t worked out that way. Dean and I have both been working on challenging cases that kept us apart for Thanksgiving, and Bellamy’s entire family came down with a flu that lasted more than two weeks and almost made Xavier attempt a full ban on them for the entire holiday season. He does not enjoy being sick. And no one around him enjoys him being sick. I am pretty sure if Bebe wasn’t a factor, he would still petition for Eric and Bellamy to not be allowed to enter the house until after the new year. I’m actually completely sure about that.
A rash of thefts and rowdy behavior uncharacteristic of
It all added up to a strange, rocky beginning to the holidays and now we’re trying to make up for it. We’re more than a week behind at this point according to the great clock of Xavier, so we’re trying to stuff a lot of Christmas into this weekend. The others aren’t here, but the four of us have been handling getting the house prepped for the season and trying to inject some festivity into what has been a challenging last few weeks.
I’ve been trying to force myself not to think about the note that appeared at my house just before Halloween. It came on the heels of my confrontation with the man responsible for a staggering string of deaths among women spread across several states. It was a complex and confusing case I almost got very wrong, and that note was chilling punctuation.
I didn’t save you for you. I saved you for myself.
I know exactly what the note refers to. I knew the second I read it. The tense moment in a dark, desolate rest area parking lot when a car went past, driven by a person I couldn’t see. It gave me just enough time to get my bearings so I could survive a showdown with a killer. I didn’t have the luxury of questioning who was driving or what their motivation was. In the chaos that followed, I didn’t think about where the car might have gone and why the person didn’t stop. The only thing that mattered was the man on the other end of my gun and the backup officers coming to take him.
But it goes beyond the mysterious driver. That moment was no more one of serendipity than the note was a Hallmark card. I know it has something to do with the series of attacks on me and the strange occurrences that have plagued me over the last several months, possibly far more. From being followed around Sherwood to finding items on my car, I have absolute proof someone is watching me. The violent attacks that left me in a coma for weeks never get far from my mind.
But that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do. Keep them out of my mind. At least for now. I tucked the note in the back of a drawer in my office so I can try to focus on enjoying the holiday season.
We carry everything into the living room and arrange the boxes by where the decorations will eventually end up. The Christmas tree is already up and for the most part decorated. I’m sure we’ll find a few more baubles and shiny things to add to it, but the foundation is there. We’ve also put up a few of the little decorative collectibles I remember being up from when I was a little girl and this was my grandparents’ house.
This was the closest place to a consistent home I had when I was younger. My childhood was defined by moving around and constantly grasping for some sort of familiarity. The result was a patchwork quilt of fractured memories some of which I still can’t confidently place. But there are some concrete experiences I can hold on to, and almost all of them happened here in Sherwood. This is where we would come for stretches of many school years, where we would spend weeks in the summer, and every Christmas.
Thinking of that and seeing Dean in the living room where I used to gleefully unwrap gifts under the watchful eyes of my parents and grandparents brings a twinge to my heart. I love those memories. The holidays here were always filled with joy and magic. Even when there was turmoil going on at the periphery of my life, I didn’t know. When I was here, I had the chance to be just purely happy.
But even then, I had the somewhat nagging awareness that my family didn’t look like the ones in Christmas movies on TV or the covers of holiday cards. There were the parents and the grandparents, but I was the only child in all those memories. I had no siblings. No cousins. It was just me.
I didn’t know until I was well into my adult years that I did have a cousin, one I never had the chance to celebrate a childhood Christmas with. Who I never got to giggle with while trying to sneak down the stairs to get a peek at presents or open stockings alongside. The family photo albums have no candid snaps of us asleep in our seasonal pajamas in front of the TV or playing with new toys.
There’s an emptiness I feel when I think about those lost moments, memories that we should have together. I got the opportunity to know our grandparents. I remember the breakfast my grandmother cooked for me every Christmas morning that always included her glorious cinnamon rolls that I have tweaked to make my own and now bake every week at least. I remember my grandfather sitting in his chair in the corner of the living room, just gazing at the Christmas lights like a little boy.
One time I asked him about that, and he told me that when he was young, they didn’t have electric lights like that on their Christmas tree. At the time, I took that to mean he didn’t have electricity when he was a child, and the world was black-and-white like in old movies. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized he definitely had electricity in his house. They just didn’t use strands of multicolored light bulbs to decorate their tree each Christmas. Instead, his parents insisted on remaining traditional and lighting tiny candles they attached to the ends of the branches.
Highly not recommended.
I hold on to the memories of running down the steps on Christmas morning to see the presents under the tree and my newly filled stocking, mesmerized by the appearance of the gifts after having snuck down to peek at, over what felt like just a short time before. I’m sure now it was actually hours, but to me as a child, it was all magic. It hurts that Dean never had that chance. Not just that he didn’t get to celebrate Christmas with us, but that he never met our grandparents. He didn’t even know his father, so he never had the opportunity to be a part of the family.
It makes it even more important to me now that we do as much as we can together. It makes my heart swell to see him carefully pull the fragile components of our great-grandmother’s nativity out of its newspaper wrapping that still has advertisements from when my grandmother was a little girl and arrange them on the side table. It has me thinking more about this house and the one a few blocks away, left vacant by Sam. It’s the house I remember him living in when we were young. In a corner of my brain, a hazy one that is filled with the confusing false memories produced by my coma, it’s where I have a new chapter with Sam after signing my grandparents’ house over to Dean and Xavier.
In the rest of my brain, I am fully aware that everything that “happened” while I was in the comatose state was just dreams fueled by Xavier’s stories along with Sam and Dean talking to me. But even knowing that, I hold on to what I still consider memories very closely. They aren’t real, and yet they feel so authentic. One of those that I treasure most is transferring the house over to them and knowing they have a place to call home when they are here in Sherwood.
“There’s still a couple hours of light out,” Sam says, hoisting one of the cardboard boxes up. “Do you want to get some of these outdoor decorations up?”
“Sure,” I say.
We each pick up some more of the outdoor decorations and head outside. It is a fairly mild afternoon, so we’re able to stay out for a couple of hours putting up lights and getting oversized ball ornaments, the plastic candy canes, and other lawn decorations in place. As I step back and watch three of the most important men in my life laughing and joking together as they prepare the house for the holidays, I know in my heart that memory is one I want to make real. I need to talk to Sam about the idea.
I’ve told Sam about a lot of what I experienced when I was unconscious, but not everything. I haven’t mentioned that particular part of that dream to him. I didn’t know how he would feel about it, and I’m still wondering that now, but I can’t stop myself from thinking about it. It’s obviously a major decision for him as much as it is for me, and I want to at least bring up the idea.
“The wicker furniture looks so summery,” Xavier says. “There should be some red cushions or something on it.”
