Page 14 of One Night with Number Nineteen

Even though he has somewhere to be and didn’t sign up to clean my dirty plates and cups and platters.

Even though he does it all with an easy aplomb, as though it isn’t a big deal.

And maybe it isn’t according to him.

I just⁠—

When his eyes come to mine for a brief moment I wonder how everyone doesn’t see what I see.

How everyone misses it.

But then he blinks and it’s gone, replaced with his steady, even self, and then I’m wondering if I imagined it all.

Or if the worry I glimpsed deep within those striking blue eyes is truly there.

Five

Sawyer

“That’s still not straight, sweetheart.”

I freeze on my way down the ladder, looking back over my shoulder. My mom’s gaze is on her phone, a glass of wine in her hand.

But apparently the lights are crooked.

Sighing, I spend a minute tugging at the lights I put up the other day, the lights I put up in the dark so I believed my mom when she said they were crooked.

In reality…she just needed some time.

Which I’m fine with—really, I am.

My mom doesn’t have anyone aside from me, so I’m all she has to call for help with her lights or to pick out her Christmas tree or check on her garbage disposal or take her car in for an oil change.

Ever since my dad died, all she’s had is me.

“What do you want for dinner?” I ask as I start to descend—the lights basically where they were before, but now with the added side dish of me fussing over them.

And Mom.

“I thought you had to go,” she says, her eyes—blue like mine—flicking up for a heartbeat.

But a heartbeat is long enough for me to see it.

The flicker of worry. The beat of longing. The anxiety nibbling at the edges of her vision.

I think of the stack of bills I need to pay, the contracts to review from my agent, the arrangements I need to make now that my prize for Bri’s youth center’s charity event has been auctioned off. I think of Faye’s new book sitting on my nightstand. Her signing event is just next week, and it seems only proper for me to actually read it since I’ll be attending.

But this is my mom.

And Christmas is in a week.

“I have time for a quick meal,” I say.

“Oh, good! Do you want me to make you that pasta you like?”

“The hamburger one?” I ask, even though I know exactly which recipe she’s talking about.

Because I’ve eaten it with her at least once a week since I was eight years old and she realized I liked it.