If the Fates Allow

by Rainbow Rowell

If you could only spend Christmas with one person, no one in her family would pick her. (No one in the world would pick her.)

No one called Reagan for comfort. No one called Reagan to offer any. No one ever said, “I’m lonely, could you come by?”—and no one ever came by. Even before this bullshit.

So they talked about the things that had brought them together today: Their worry. Their caution. Their firm belief that most people were idiots.

She framed every school photo the grandkids ever gave her, always leaving the old ones inside so that the pictures stacked up and made the backs hard to close. Reagan’s senior picture was sitting on a coffee table in the living room, and if you opened it up, her whole childhood would spring out.

Now her head and mouth felt empty. She felt like she carried emptiness around with her, a six-foot radius of it.

(She didn’t need people the way other people needed people, but she still needed . . . something.)

“Sometimes I think you don’t want to get back to normal, Reagan. Sometimes I think you like it better this way.” Sometimes Reagan agreed with her.