tree?” His voice was growing louder, and Eva worried that it would travel through the wall. Or onto the front porch, where Liz would be any minute.
As if on cue, she heard Liz close her front door and lock it.
“You need to go, Dex. I’ll take care of it. I promise.”
He looked at her, as if he were trying to see beneath the surface, to glean whether something bigger was going on. “By tomorrow,” he said.
“Tomorrow,” she agreed.
He pulled open the door and came face-to-face with Liz, startled, her hand raised to knock.
“Hello,” she said, her gaze traveling between Dex and Eva, curious.
Dex’s expression shifted into an easy smile. “I hear you two are shopping for a tree. Have fun.” He gave them a wink, ever the performer playing his part, before bounding down the stairs and striding away.
“Who was that?” Liz asked. “He’s handsome.”
Eva tried to gather her wits, to lighten her expression to match Dex’s friendly tone. The last thing she wanted to do now was shop for a tree, but if she backed out, Liz would have a hundred questions. “That was Dex,” she said.
“Are you two…?” she said, trailing off.
Eva pulled her door closed and locked it. “It’s complicated,” she said. “Let’s go.”
As they drove north toward Santa Rosa, Eva let the miles put distance between herself and what happened, compartmentalizing it into a tiny ball, where it sat, like a pebble in her shoe. She was furious with herself for being so careless. For working herself so thin she’d made a mistake like that. She couldn’t risk any kind of targeted attention, and yet she’d invited it in.
By the time they reached the tree farm, she’d worked out a plan. After they returned to Berkeley, she’d work all night. Again. She redoubled her efforts to focus on Liz, who was describing the tree they’d buy, a special one they’d plant in front of the house instead of propping it in a stand of water for a few weeks.
“You won’t believe how beautiful it will be,” Liz told her as they walked between rows and rows of tall, majestic pines. She examined each tree, checking to see whether it was full all the way around, before moving on to the next one. She spoke softly, carried somewhere else by memory. “My dad and I used to do this when I was a girl. Every place we lived—and there were many—the two of us would look for a new tree to join our family.” She reached her hand out as they walked, brushing the pine needles with her fingertips. “He made Christmas magical.”
When Eva was little, when she thought there was still a chance they’d come back for her, she used to fantasize what Christmas would be like if she’d grown up with her birth family. If her mother hadn’t been an addict but instead the kind of parent who would insist Santa was real, staying up late assembling toys and filling stockings. And when Eva woke, she’d race to the tree and tear off wrapping paper, each present bigger and better than the last, always exactly what she wanted. Maybe her grandparents and extended family would come over. Perhaps there would be cousins, other children to round out the image of her perfect family. But now that picture had shifted, carrying with it the knowledge that those Christmases would have been heavy with her mother’s absence.
“Will your daughter be coming for the holidays?” Eva asked, unsure how she’d feel about meeting Ellie, of being displaced by the daughter of Liz’s heart.
“She’s working,” she said. The finality of her tone made it clear that she didn’t want to discuss it more.
Liz slipped between two trees and into another row. “This one,” she called, her words muted by the thick pine needles surrounding them and underfoot.
Eva followed the sound of her voice and found her in front of a tree, nearly eight feet tall and perfect in shape. “How are we going to get it home?” Eva pictured the two of them driving down the highway with this massive tree strapped to their roof, its roots dangling behind them.
“They’ll deliver it,” Liz said, walking around the tree slowly, looking at it from all angles. “We’ll string it with lights that will sparkle. We can bundle up, make some hot chocolate, and sit on the porch and admire it. The best part is that the tree will be here, year in and year out. No more dead trees by