My Own People Betrayed Me at My Engagement Barbecue, So I Took the Hill Back novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: The Porch Swing

Snow came down on Christmas Eve, thin and dry.

It was a few flakes, the kind the Hill Country does not see twice a decade.

We carried our coffee out to the porch swing on the sleeping porch of the Hartmann house.

I wore his old canvas coat over my underwear and a pair of wool socks.

We sat with a quilt over our knees.

Cade had hung a string of lights along the rail.

The lane was white, and the creek ran black beneath it.

"I have something for you," I said.

I took the flat parcel out from under the quilt.

I had wrapped it in brown paper and tied it with the red thread from the Sonntagshaus key.

I could not find ribbon.

He turned it over in his hands.

"It's heavy for paper," he said.

"It's a frame."

He tore off the paper and held the picture under the porch light.

Two young women stood on the front steps of the big house with their arms around each other's waists, squinting into the sun.

One was my mother, with her brown hair in a long braid.

The other was a freckled woman with a wide mouth, laughing so hard her eyes were shut.

"That's Dora," I said. "I found it in my mother's trunk. It was under the christening gown."

Cade did not say anything.

His thumb moved over the glass above the laughing woman's face.

His hand was shaking, the same small shake I had seen in the kitchen the night I came.

"I don't have one where she's laughing," he said at last. "I have three, and she's sick in all of them."

"Now you have four."

He set the frame on his knee and pulled me against his side so hard that my coffee spilled.

He kissed the top of my head, and then my temple.

Then he put his face in my hair and breathed.

I let him.

I held the back of his coat in both fists, and the swing moved gently under us.

When he sat up his eyes were red, and he looked embarrassed.

"I've got something too," he said, and reached behind the swing.

The box was long and flat, with a lid.

I lifted it.

Inside, in tissue, lay a pair of boots in oiled brown leather.

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