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.

They were the sort of people who got laid off right before Christmas and got pregnant in the back seat of cars. Why were they willing to roll these dice?

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.

(Reagan didn’t let many people into her life—but once she’d gone to the effort, she didn’t like to let go of them.)

(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.