Page 59 of A Winter Wish

But she’d wished, year after year, for her dad to come back, for him to pick her, for things to go back to when it was the three of them—and it had never come true.

“You have a favorite place you’ve been to?”

Lexie blinked at Theo. “Ah…”

“Or a favorite place you spent Christmas?”

“I don’t know. They are kind of all my favorite, while I’m there.” But she could tell he was trying to change the subject away from the wish jar—probably picking up on her annoyance at him. So she relented. “I actually spent Christmas in Australia one year. It was right after university, and I had no idea what to do, so I decided to go there. You can get a work visa for a year, as long as you don’t stay longer than six months in one job, and that sounded perfect. I got a job as a waitress, made a load of friends.” Friends she didn’t really speak to anymore, because time and distance had pulled them apart. “Anyway, we all spent Christmas on the beach. I was on the Gold Coast—it’s in Queensland—and I used to get up early every day to watch the sunrise. I’m not really a morning person, but it’s impossible not to be a morning person there. So we got up—a bunch of us who were either traveling or were living away from family—and we all went to the beach and had a barbecue on Christmas Day. It was so cool.”

“I always wanted to go to Australia,” Theo said. “But my moving around tended to be from city to city in the UK, because I was too useless to save up any money or properly apply for jobs abroad.” She noticed how harsh he was on himself, but decided not to comment as he asked her another question. “What’s the longest you’ve stayed in one place?”

“Ah, since university? A year, I think.” She felt self-conscious about admitting that, even if he wasn’t doing what people usually did—remarking that it must be hard to build a life that way, or making fake gushing, admiring noises. “I like it,” she added, on the defensive.

“Yeah, I can see that.”

She wasn’t sure what to do with that, so she deflected. “What about you? You said you moved around a lot?”

“Yeah. Mainly because I couldn’t get a job I thought I was any good at and I made things difficult for the poor people employing me as a result.”

“Troublemaker?”

He grinned. “Totally.” Then his expression evened out a bit as he looked over her head to the street beyond. “When I moved to Bath, I figured it would be the same thing. But because of Richard, here I am, five years later. It sometimes feels bizarre—but somewhere along the line, this place has ended up feeling like home, you know?”

She nodded—though she wasn’t sure she totally did know. Home was wherever she was at the time, and she’d gotten good at that. But sometimes it felt exhausting. “And you’ve been in the flat all that time?”

“Not at first. I was in a shared house for a bit, before Richard and I worked out a deal where I could rent it. It’s temporary,” he said, bringing his attention back to her. “I wasn’t trying to, like, leech off your dad or anything. I’m saving to buy a house—which really does make me sound boring compared to you.”

Lexie smiled slightly. “ ‘Boring’ is not a word I’d use to describe you.” She studied him for a moment. “What was it that made you stick around?”

“Honestly? I think I’d been looking for a reason to stick somewhere. But I was too, you know…scared, to stay put—moving around means you don’t let anyone down.”

Lexie nodded, and she felt a little relieved—because that wasn’t the same for her.

“So Richard, him believing in me and making me see that I wasn’t letting him down—it gave me what I needed to stay put. And because of that, I figured out I liked the job. I get to travel, get paid to do it. And I like finding holidays for people, like building the itineraries, discovering new things.”

She kept nodding, not wanting to admit that she liked that part of it, too.

“Like Iceland—if we can get out there this year, I reckon it’s going to be pretty epic, and it’s kind of unbelievable that that’s my job, you know?”

She registered the “we” and was unsure if he meant the general “we” or if he was referring to her, specifically. Something tightened in her stomach, though she couldn’t quite pinpoint why. Because he might want to spend time with her there? Or because, even if she did go to Iceland with him, it was only a matter of time before the “we” was obsolete.

“You’ve got your overthinking face on again.”

“No, it’s just…” She didn’t want to admit what she’d really been thinking. “Iceland. It’s…We had this tradition.” And she explained about their family holidays, about spending Christmas in a different place each year. About how they were supposed to go to Iceland the year Richard left. And how now, she couldn’t help the thought that he’d been taking the family tradition she’d loved, and the holiday she’d been so excited to go on, and using it to make money.

I promise I’ll take you there one day, Little Lex. She remembered him saying that, when she’d cried at the fact that he was leaving. She wasn’t really crying about the holiday, of course, but he’d latched on to that—perhaps because it was an easier promise. But it was still a promise he’d broken, in the end.

Theo let her talk, listening. And when she finished, he just said, “I’ll go in and pay.”

“I’ll pay my half,” Lexie said immediately, but he waved it away.

“We’ll put it on the company. We talked about work, didn’t we?”

They walked back to the office, the big Georgian buildings seeming to bask in the sun. “You could look at it a different way,” Theo said conversationally, and Lexie glanced at him. “You could say that he was trying to treasure something—to honor you and your family tradition. And to me, there are two things that suggest that he was thinking of you, the whole time.”

Lexie frowned, and he elaborated.

“Iceland and Madrid, for one. He never did anything in Madrid, and I was wondering about that, until you told me about the trip he took Rachel on. He let you down. It was a dickish thing to do, and I can’t even imagine how it must have felt. But he didn’t want to do Madrid with the company—and I can’t help wondering if that’s the reason why.”