***
John opened the front door and stared at the entranceway.
“Surprise!” Bella shouted from the staircase. “Do you like what we’ve done, dad?”
John’s mouth dropped open and his mind went blank. He hadn’t seen so much tinsel in one place in years. Six years.
“Your dad’s blown away by how beautiful it is, aren’t you, John?” Rachel looked down from the top of the ladder she was standing on.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Rachel stuck another piece of tape on the ornament that was hanging below his chandelier. “We’re bringing the Christmas spirit indoors.”
Bella ran down the stairs and hugged her dad. “Isn’t it great? We went to Walmart and bought a whole cart of decorations. Tank thought someone was shooting at us and we found a blow-up Santa. We weren’t going to bring it home, but Tank thought it was too good a bargain not to buy it.”
Bella was looking at him expectantly, waiting for him to say something that made sense. “Someone shot at you?” He was struggling to keep his voice level.
“No.” Rachel wobbled on the ladder and he reached out to steady it. “Thanks. There were no guns. It was a balloon popping competition.”
“And you thought it was a gun?”
Bella took a decoration out of the box on the hall table. “Tank thought it was a gun. We had to crouch on the ground and look for a safe way out of the store. Do you want to see our Christmas tree?”
John wiped his hand across his eyes. “You’ve got a tree?”
Tank stuck his head around the edge of the doorframe. “Sorry, boss. There was no stopping them.”
Rachel sent Tank a withering glare. “Did you, or did you not, have a good time buying the Christmas decorations?”
“I did once I had Santa in my truck.”
Bella grabbed hold of her dad’s hand and pulled him into the living room. “We haven’t put the Christmas angel on the top. We were waiting for you.”
John stood in the middle of the room and looked at the Christmas tree. It was loaded with decorations in all sorts of colors, shapes, and sizes. Tinsel glittered from the branches and sparkling fairy lights flashed slowly through the tree.
Once he’d gotten used to the tree, he let his gaze wander around the rest of the room. A huge blow-up Santa and a reindeer sat in a corner of the room, glowing from some kind of light inside them. The coffee table had been decorated with a red tablecloth, pinecones, and candles. And to bring the whole nightmare together was some Christmas music, wafting through the room on his sound system.
He didn’t know what to say.
Rachel was looking at him, prompting his sluggish brain into saying something that was so far from the truth that it wasn’t funny. Up until this Christmas, he’d managed to keep their celebrations to a minimum. They’d unpack a small artificial tree, drive into town to see the Christmas parade, and go to church with Patty and her husband on Christmas Eve.
This year he’d been thrown head-first into the festive season, whether he wanted to be there or not.
Bella handed him a red and gold Christmas angel. “She’s really pretty. Can you reach the top of the tree?”
“Wait there.” Rachel darted out of the room and came back carrying the ladder she’d been standing on. “This should work.”
Her smile was supposed to be encouraging, only he couldn’t see any reason to be part of what they’d created. Until he looked at Bella. Her eyes were full of excitement and wonder and so many other things he’d forgotten. He felt like a cold-hearted fool.
Tank opened the ladder. “You okay?”
John nodded. He had to be. Bella was looking at him as if this was the most natural thing in the world for him to do. But it wasn’t, not by a long shot.
The smile on Rachel’s face disappeared. She watched him closely, wisely choosing not to say anything.
Bella followed every step he took on the ladder. “Higher, dad. The angel needs to be at the top of the tree.”
He took another step, then slipped the tie at the back of the angel around the tree. “Is that all right?”
“Perfect.” Bella sighed. “I’m going to get some Christmas cookies. We could have them with a big glass of milk.”
John was grateful that Tank went with Bella. He needed a few minutes to pull himself together and get over the shock of seeing so much tinsel.
“What’s wrong?” Rachel asked as soon as Bella was out of the room.
“I don’t do Christmas, not like this.” He climbed down the ladder and sat on the sofa. Everything looked so shiny and new.
“I thought Tank was exaggerating.”
“Tank never exaggerates.” He listened to Bella chatting to Tank, the sound of her laughter as she got her cookies ready for them.
Rachel sat beside him. “Why don’t you like Christmas?”
He kept his gaze focused on the fireplace. Red and orange flames leaped in the air. “Jacinta died a week before Christmas. We buried her on Christmas Eve. Bella was hurt in the car accident and had to miss her mom’s funeral.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t know. I try to make it a good day for Bella, but something inside of me refuses to forget what happened. It took me three days to get back from Afghanistan after the accident. Jacinta’s parents had been looking after Bella in the hospital. They wanted me to leave her with them.”
“For how long?”
“Permanently.” He could still hear Jacinta’s parents arguing with him, trying to convince him that Bella was better off with them. The cold logic of why they would make better parents made sense. He’d been overseas for most of the first two years of Bella’s life. He’d known nothing about looking after a toddler, and even less about being a dad.
When he left the military he had no job, a home that he was a stranger in, and a daughter who kept asking for her mommy. He’d barely managed to survive the first six months of life without Jacinta. But life had gone on. Jacinta’s parents had given up waiting for him to fail and he’d realized that being a dad wasn’t as hard as he thought it would be.
John looked across the room at the big, blow-up Santa. “I think your reindeer and Santa are supposed to be outside.”
“We didn’t want to scare you.”
The smile in Rachel’s voice cut through the memories inside his head. “It must have cost you a fortune for all of these decorations. I’ll give you the money for them.”
“No you won’t. We shopped at Walmart and everything was half price.”
Tank walked into the room carrying a tray with four mugs on it. “Remind me to swap with Tanner next time Rachel wants to go shopping.”
“You just don’t want to admit that you had fun.” Rachel took the mug that Tank held out to her and looked inside. “You made hot chocolate for me?”
“I thought you’d like it better than milk.”
The smile Rachel sent Tank made John frown. “Is there anything else you’ve planned and haven’t told me about?”
Bella left a plate of cookies on the table. She sat on the other side of John, leaning in close. “We bought you some presents,” she whispered, “but Rachel said I can’t tell you what they are. They’re a surprise.”
He glanced at Rachel. She was sipping her drink, watching Bella. She hadn’t learned that his daughter was hopeless at keeping secrets. After a few hours, the excitement of keeping information inside her was too much, and she’d tell everyone what she knew. “Have you gone decoration crazy in the rest of the house?”
Bella shook her head. “Mrs. Daniels had already unpacked the fairy lights for the kitchen. We decided to hang our decorations in the entranceway and living room.” She walked across to the reindeer beside the blow-up Santa and hugged him tight. “Isn’t Rudolph amazing? He’s as tall as me, dad. Do you think we could go back to Walmart and buy a snowman? He’d look amazing beside Rudolph.”
John focused on his daughter’s face. Bella had always lo
oked forward to Christmas, but she’d never been this animated or excited. Each December, he tried to make up for what she’d lost—what they’d both lost—by not turning Christmas into a big deal. But Bella was happier than he’d ever seen her. After all of the issues he was having at work, maybe this Christmas would be different.
“I’ve got another idea,” John said. “Instead of going to Walmart, why don’t we make our own snowman in the backyard?”
Bella’s mouth dropped open. “Out of real snow?”
John nodded. “You could ask Mrs. Daniels if she has any carrots that we could use for his nose.”
Bella’s arms dropped from around the reindeer. She ran toward the kitchen, yelling over the Christmas carols for Mrs. Daniels.
Tank bit into one of Bella’s cookies and stood up. “You’ve made one little girl happy. I’ll let the rest of the team know that we’re heading outside.”
Tank left the room and Rachel’s worried gaze met John’s. “You’ve got more bodyguards outside? Why?”
This was one of the few times in his life when John didn’t know what to say. Too much information could scare her, too little could be deadly. “I’ve got something I need to tell you, but you’ve got to promise that you won’t repeat this to anyone.”
Rachel put down her mug of chocolate. “It sounds serious.”
“It is. I received a death threat this morning.”