A Cinderella Story. Maureen Child

for freedom. He was right, she couldn’t really know what he’d survived. She didn’t even want to imagine it.

      “You’re squishing me, Mommy!”

      “Sorry, baby.” She swallowed the knot in her throat and gave her girl a smile. “You go ahead and play with Sam. I’ll come get you when it’s time to go. As soon as I finish doing the updates on this website. Promise.”

      “Okay!” Holly turned to go and stopped when Joy spoke up again.

      “No wandering off, Holly. Right to the workshop.”

      “Can’t I look at my fairy house Sam helped me make? There might be fairies there now.”

      Boy, she was really going to miss this imaginative age when Holly grew out of it. But, though the fairy house wasn’t exactly inside the woods, it was close enough that a little girl might be tempted to walk in more deeply and then end up getting lost. So, no. “We’ll look later.”

      “Okay, ’bye!” And she was gone like a tiny pink hurricane.

      Joy glanced out the window and watched her daughter bullet across the lawn to the workshop and then slip inside the doors. Smiling to herself, she thought she’d give a lot to see Sam’s reaction to his visitor.

      * * *

      “Hi, Sam! Mommy said I could come play with you!”

      She didn’t catch him completely by surprise. Thankfully, Sam had spotted the girl running across the yard and had had time to toss a heavy beige tarp over his latest project. Although why he’d started on it was beyond him. A whim that had come on him two days ago, he’d thrown himself into it late last night when he’d left Joy in the great room.

      Guilt had pushed him away from her, and it was guilt that had kept him working half the night. Memories crowded his brain, but it was thoughts of Joy herself that kept him on edge. That kiss. The heavy sigh of her breath as she molded herself to him. The eager response and matching need that had thrown him harder than he’d expected.

      Shaking his head, he grumbled, “Don’t have time to play.” He turned to his workbench to find something to do.

      “I can help you like I did with the fairy house. I want to see if there are fairies there but Mommy said I couldn’t go by myself. Do you want to go with me? Cuz we can be busy outside, too, can’t we?” She walked farther into the room and, as if she had radar, moved straight to the tarp draped across his project. “What’s this?”

      “Mine,” he said and winced at the sharpness of his tone. But the girl, just like her mother, was impossible to deflate. She simply turned that bright smile of hers on him and said, “It’s a secret, right? I like secrets. I can tell you one. It’s about Lizzie’s mommy going to have another baby. She thinks Lizzie doesn’t know but Lizzie heard her mommy tell her daddy that she passed the test.”

      Too much information coming too quickly. He’d already learned about the wonderful Lizzie and her puppy. And this latest news blast might come under the heading of TMI.

      “I wanted a sister, too,” Holly said and walked right up to his workbench, climbing onto the stool she’d used the last time she was there. “But Mommy says I have to have a puppy instead and that’s all right cuz babies cry a lot and a puppy doesn’t...”

      “Why don’t we go check the fairy house?” Sam said, interrupting the flow before his head exploded. Getting her out of the shop seemed the best way to keep her from asking about the tarp again. It wasn’t as if he wanted to go look for fairies in the freezing-cold woods.

      “Oh, boy!” She squirmed off the stool, then grabbed his hand with her much smaller one.

      Just for a second, Sam felt a sharp tug at the edges of his heart, and it was painful. Holly was older than Eli had been, he told himself, and she was a girl—so completely different children. But he couldn’t help wondering what Eli would have been like at Holly’s age. Or as he would be now at almost nine. But Eli would always be three years old. Just finding himself. Just becoming more of a boy than a baby and never a chance to be more.

      “Let’s go, Sam!” Holly pulled on his hand and leaned forward as if she could drag him behind her if she just tried hard enough.

      He folded his fingers around hers and let her lead him from the shop into the cold. And he listened to her talk, heard again about puppies and fairies and princesses, and told himself that maybe this was his punishment. Being lulled into affection for a child who wasn’t his. A child who would disappear from his life in a few short weeks.

      And he wasn’t completely stupid, he told himself. He could see through Joy’s machinations. She wanted to wake him up, she’d said. To drag him back into the land of the living, and clearly, she was allowing her daughter to be part of that program.

      “There it is!” Holly’s excitement ratcheted up another level, and Sam thought the girl’s voice hit a pitch that only dogs should have been able to hear. But her absolute pleasure in the smallest things was hard to ignore, damn it.

      She let go of his hand and ran the last few steps to the fairy house on her own. Bending down, she inspected every window and even opened the tiny door to look inside. And Sam was drawn to the girl’s absolute faith that she would see something. Even disappointment didn’t jar the thrill in her eyes. “I don’t see them,” she said, turning her head to look at him.

      “Maybe they’re out having a picnic,” he said, surprising himself by playing into the game. “Or shopping.”

      “Like Mommy and me are gonna do,” Holly said, jumping up and down as if she simply couldn’t hold back the excitement any more. “We’re gonna get a Christmas tree today.”

      He felt a hitch in the center of his chest, but he didn’t say anything.

      “We’re getting a little one this time to put in our room cuz you don’t like Christmas. How come you don’t like Christmas, Sam?”

      “I...it’s complicated.” He hunched deeper into his black leather jacket and stuffed both hands into the pockets.

      “Compulcated?”

      “Complicated,” he corrected, wondering how the hell he’d gotten into this conversation with a five-year-old.

      “Why?”

      “Because it’s about a lot of things all at once,” he said, hoping to God she’d leave it there. He should have known better.

      Her tiny brow furrowed as she thought about it. Finally, though, she shrugged and said, “Okay. Do you think fairies go buy Christmas trees? Will there be lights in their little house? Can I see ’em?”

      So grateful to have left the Christmas thing behind, he said, “Maybe if you look really hard one night you’ll see some.”

      “I can look really hard, see?” Her eyes squinted and her mouth puckered up, showing him just how strong her looking power was.

      “That’s pretty hard.” The wind gave a great gust and about knocked Holly right off her feet. He reached out, steadied her, then said, “You should go on back to the house with your mom.”

      “But we’re not done looking.” She grabbed his hand again, and this time, it was more comforting than unsettling. Pulling on him, she wandered over to one side of the fairy house, where the pine needles lay thick as carpet on the ground. “Could we make another fairy house and put it right here, by this big tree? That’s like a Christmas tree, right? Maybe the fairies would put lights on it, too.”

      He was scrambling now. He’d never meant to get so involved. Not with the child. Not with her mother. But Holly’s sweetness and Joy’s...everything...kept sucking him in. Now he was making fairy houses and secret projects and freezing his ass off looking for invisible creatures.

      “Sure,” he said, in an attempt to get the girl moving toward the house. “We can build another one. In a day or two. Maybe.”

      “Okay,