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.)

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.

She wasn’t trying to be mean. (She didn’t have to try. It came naturally.)

“Just Mason,” she said. “I like that Mason.

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