Coming Home For Christmas. Marie Ferrarella

fact that she was gone.

      “There are no do-overs, even if you thought there should be. You don’t get to decide things like that,” he informed her. And then his voice grew louder as his anger came to the fore. “Don’t you think it tore me apart, seeing you do that? Acting like Amy when Amy wasn’t there anymore? You were her mother—my mother. You were supposed to act like one, not like some teenage girl with a mission.

      “And where did all that get you in the end?” he demanded heatedly. “Nowhere, dead on a slab, that’s where it got you.” Because now that he thought about it, his mother’s erratic, age-denying lifestyle must have contributed to her demise. “Now your life’s gone, too, just like Amy’s.”

      The disgust abated from his voice, and it softened again just a hint. “Maybe you could have lived longer if you hadn’t lived so crazy. I don’t know, and it’s too late to find out.” He turned to leave, then stopped, another wave of recrimination hovering on his lips. “But you shouldn’t have done it. You shouldn’t have,” he repeated, stopping short of raising his voice to the level of shouting.

      He didn’t want to attract anyone to the room. Having a meltdown here in the middle of the funeral home was bad enough without it being witnessed by a bunch of strangers.

      Still, Keith stood there in the room for a few more moments, doing his best to pull himself together. Searching for a way to reconcile the fact that he was never going to see his mother’s face again. This was to be the last time he’d see her, and he told himself that he shouldn’t care.

      But he did.

      Calling himself a fool, Keith squared his shoulders and turned to walk out of the small viewing room. He didn’t have time for this, didn’t have time to let something as useless as grief eat away at him. He had loose ends to tie up and a busy life to get back to. He wouldn’t stand around and mope over a woman who had had no regard for him whatsoever, who had shut him out when he’d tried to reach her and make her accept reality.

      This, he thought, taking one last look at Dorothy O’Connell, was the final reality.

      Turning, he took a long stride out of the room—and walked straight into the young woman he couldn’t quite place, who was standing just outside the room.

      And who was apparently, if the expression on her face and the tears glistening in her eyes were any indication, listening to every word he’d just said to his late mother.

       Chapter Four

      It was a toss up whether he was more surprised or angry to find her there.

      “Please tell me you’ve found a buyer for all those things in the house. Either that, or you suddenly need a funeral home, because otherwise, you have absolutely no reason to be here right now, hovering outside my mother’s viewing room,” he informed her.

      He wasn’t all that sure he could tolerate the truth, but he wasn’t about to put up with any kind of lie.

      “You’re my reason,” she told him, her voice as quiet as his was sharp.

       Stalker.

      The word flashed through his head in big, bold letters. Was that what he’d done, hired a stalker? The possibility made him angrier.

      The scowl on his face was meant to be intimidating. “You’re going to have to explain that. Carefully,” he warned.

      His eyes held her prisoner, as if to say that he could see right through her and would immediately know if she was lying to him.

      Because he seemed so angry, Kenzie deliberately curbed her habit of speaking quickly. Instead, she enunciated every word that she uttered so he could absorb it.

      “You were coming here alone, and this isn’t the sort of thing a person should have to face alone,” she told Keith with feeling. “I thought you might need a friend, so I came.”

      Keith stared at her. “You’re not my friend. We have a working relationship,” he reminded her tersely, then added, “I don’t make friends that easily.”

      That she could readily believe, despite how popular he’d once been. Still, even though he had apparently changed, that didn’t alter the way she felt about what he was going through or what had initially compelled her to come to the funeral home, looking for him.

      Given what she’d heard him say when he thought no one was listening, she knew better than most what he was going through.

      Kenzie approached the subject slowly. “I had an argument with my father.”

      Keith’s scowl deepened. “I’m not your priest, either, which means I don’t do confessions.” And then his curiosity about what she was thinking got the better of him. “What does your argument with your father have to do with me?” he demanded.

      Kenzie pretended that he hadn’t asked any impatient questions. Instead, she went on as if the man she addressed was quietly waiting to be enlightened.

      “My father definitely had opinions about my lifestyle, my choice of friends. You know, all the usual reasons fathers and daughters butt heads. I put up with it for a while, then decided that if that was how he felt, it was his loss, not mine, and I stopped talking to him. I refused to return his calls and, to make a long story short—”

      “Too late,” Keith informed her tersely.

      He was making it difficult for her to get her point across, but she pushed on. “I smugly put him in his place—or so I thought.” Her voice became more serious as she continued. “I also thought there was all the time in the world to resolve these differences between us when I was good and ready to.”

      Kenzie took a breath. She and her father had had more than their share of differences, but she’d loved him, and it still hurt to think about him no longer being part of her life.

      “My father died before that happened. To this day, I really regret not mending those fences. And I regret not getting off my high horse and just declaring those differences we had to be meaningless water under the bridge.” She looked up into Keith’s eyes. “So I know firsthand what it’s like to have someone die on you before you have a chance to make up.”

      “I had no intentions of making up,” he informed Kenzie.

      Kenzie shook her head. “You say that now, but you don’t really mean it.”

      “Look—”

      Kenzie wasn’t about to back down from her position. She was certain that she was right and he was in a state of stubborn denial.

      “No one but the Tasmanian Devil wants to live in a state of perpetual warfare.” She looked past Keith’s shoulder toward the casket. “I’d like to pay my last respects to your mother.”

      That really didn’t make any sense to him. “Why would you possibly want to look at the earthly remains of Dorothy O’Connell?”

      Moving into the room, Kenzie gazed down at the woman and then at Keith before turning back to the deceased again. “I’m looking at more than that.”

      “An estate sale with a side order of philosophy,” Keith said sarcastically. “Does that come as a package deal, or am I required to pay extra for it?”

      “You know,” she said in a tone that was devoid of judgment and composed solely of concern, “you might do a lot better getting along with yourself if you just dropped the attitude—and the ‘philosophy,’ as you call it, is free. As for our business arrangement, I only get a percentage of the total sales once they’re final,” she pointed out. “That’s written in the contract I brought with me,” she told him before he had a chance to ask about it.

      Circumventing him, Kenzie went straight to the casket for a closer look at his mother. “She was always a pretty lady,” she observed