Money, Guns, and a Merry Christmas novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: Merry Christmas
The Pine Hollow paper landed on the porch at six in the morning on Christmas Eve, and my grandmother beat me to it.
She was already at the kitchen table with her scissors when I came down in Bennet's flannel shirt.
I was five months along, and it didn't button over my stomach anymore.
"Page four," my grandmother said, without looking up. "Same as you."
She turned the paper around.
There was a photograph at the top of the page, in black and white.
A tall man in a cheap grey suit, in front of a fireplace, with a mantel clock behind his shoulder.
A woman in an old ivory dress, laughing at something out of the frame.
It was Celine's one picture.
Under it the caption said only, "Bennet and Alana Heller, Mill Road, married here in January."
Nothing about Ironvale.
Nothing about anything.
"I told the editor if he put the company in it, I'd quit the prayer chain," my grandmother said. "He folded like a lawn chair."
"Grandma, it's his first picture in twenty-three years."
"I know what it is." She cut carefully along the edge. "That's why it's on page four."
She took a manila folder out of the drawer by the stove.
Inside was a yellowed paper from the morning I was born, with my father's name on it, and her pencil note.
She laid the new clipping on top of it and closed the folder.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of Money, Guns, and a Merry Christmas are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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