TOWARD THE DISTANCE Chapter 21

The days moved quietly after that — one dissolving into the next like watercolors bleeding into wet paper.

Elena painted every morning. She painted the forest, the snow, the way the light changed through the window as the afternoon shifted from grey to gold to dark. She painted the cat. She painted Lisa's hands around a coffee cup. She painted things she hadn't painted in years — abstract pieces, strange and vivid, the kind of work that poured out of her when she stopped trying to be careful.

She was painting again. For herself. For the first time in over a decade.

Christmas Eve arrived with a fresh round of snow and an invitation from Lisa.

"My brother George is coming home tonight," Lisa said, appearing at Elena's door with a bottle of wine and a bright, conspiratorial smile. "It'll just be the three of us. Very casual. Very cozy. Will you come?"

Elena hesitated — but only for a moment. She had no reason to refuse, and the truth was, she enjoyed Lisa's company more than she'd enjoyed almost anyone's in a long time.

She brought flowers, the cat, and a thermos of fresh coffee. Lisa's cottage was already half-decorated when they arrived — a tall Christmas tree leaning slightly to one side, a tangle of ornaments piled on the floor, a wreath that had clearly been assembled by someone who had never seen a wreath before.

"George was supposed to do all of this," Lisa explained, gesturing helplessly at the chaos. "He bought half the decorations and then disappeared for three hours. I have no idea where he went."

Elena laughed — a real laugh, full and warm — and rolled up her sleeves. "Give me a chair and a footstool. I can reach the top."

She was taller than Lisa by several inches. Standing on the makeshift platform of a kitchen chair stacked on a wooden step stool, she could just barely reach the peak of the tree with her fingertips. The two of them worked together, passing ornaments back and forth, arguing cheerfully about where the tinsel should go, until the tree looked genuinely beautiful.

They were in the middle of debating the placement of the star when the front door opened and a tall, broad-shouldered young man stumbled in, holding a tangled mess of colored lights above his head like a trophy.

"I found the fairy lights —" he started, grinning.

He stopped dead.

Elena turned around from the tree, a glass ornament still in her hand, and smiled at him politely. "You must be George. I'm Wren Faraway — your sister's tenant. She's in the kitchen with the turkey."

George stared at her.

He was tall — almost as tall as the Christmas tree — with pale skin and the kind of bright blue eyes that seemed to catch light from nowhere. He looked, in that moment, like a very large, very friendly dog who had just been startled by a butterfly.

Lisa appeared from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel. "George! Stop standing there. Come help me carry the turkey!"

He blinked. Grabbed the fairy lights — which he'd completely forgotten he was holding — and handed them to Elena with both hands, like he was presenting an offering at a shrine.

Elena took them without comment and went back to decorating the tree.

Christmas dinner was warm and loud and wonderful. Lisa cooked too much food, as she always did. George ate too much, as he always did. Elena sat between them and felt, for the first time in months, like she belonged somewhere.

After dinner, they exchanged gifts. Lisa had gotten Elena a beautiful set of brushes — the expensive kind, with real bristle, the sort of thing Elena would never have bought for herself. Elena had brought each of them a small painting she'd finished that week — Lisa's was the forest at dawn, George's was the cat sleeping in a patch of sunlight.

George looked at his painting for a long time, holding it carefully in both hands, like he was afraid he might damage it.

Then he looked up at Elena, and his expression shifted into something so earnest, so completely unguarded, that it almost made her laugh.

"Would you be my girlfriend?" he asked.

No preamble. No setup. No clever line or romantic gesture. Just the question, asked plainly, like he genuinely didn't know what else to say.

Elena pushed the small gift she'd prepared for them across the table — a wrapped package for each of them, tied with ribbon. She looked at George with a gentle, honest smile.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I think I'm going to leave here eventually. And when I do —"

"Where will you go?" he asked.

Elena looked out the window, at the snow falling in the dark, at the Christmas tree glowing behind her, at the strange and unexpected warmth of this small life she had built from nothing.

"Toward the distance," she said.

— THE END —