It's Not Christmas Without You (The Holloway Series) by HelenKay Dimon Read Free Book Online

we’re the reason she stayed in West Virginia, with my dad. In the family.”
    “I still don’t—”
    Carrie pressed a finger against Austin’s lips. “She wanted out. Still wants out.”
    “Maybe you’re being hard on her? She may not be perfect but she’s a hell of a mom. Always there for you no matter what.”
    With Austin’s fractured family background, having a mom who managed to hang around and stuck it out likely seemed damn near perfect. His life made her explanation even harder. “She’s there in body only.”
    Austin, always so sure with his words, stumbled and stammered until he finally got a sentence out. “She can cook a meal for fifty people without blinking. She came to every event for you and Mitch, and stayed up for the end of every date when I brought you home like she was a member of the kissing police or something.”
    “Baking and sewing, yeah, she taught herself all of it because her mother told her that’s what good wives did.” And Carrie’s mother had refused to pass on any of the kitchen wisdom. Whether on purpose or not wasn’t clear, but the list of supposed wifely virtues skipped right over Carrie.
    Austin put a hand under her chin and lifted her gaze to his. “I’m lost.”
    She fought to bring back the memory she’d worked so hard to trample and erase. “She wanted to be a journalist. To see the world. The job at that dinky penny saver is as close as she got to roaming in search of stories that mattered to her.”
    “You’re making a leap from your mother’s college major and current hobby to a life of dissatisfaction.”
    Carrie wished that were true. She’d give anything for Austin to be right…but he wasn’t. “I lived it. Saw how desperation and disappointment could eat away at a person until there was nothing left. No dreams or hope.”
    The way her mom sat at one end of the dinner table and stared down to the other end with eyes filled with anger. A misplaced comment about how there was nothing left for her or a harsh joke about how Carrie’s father ruined everything. Jokes her father never joined in.
    Her parents didn’t have an easy give-and-take or even a steady comfort. They laughed and smiled, but never while in the same room together. The separate beds and separate bedrooms amounted to more than a hint about their coexistence. They tolerated each other and nothing else.
    “Did she tell you all of this?” Austin asked in a low voice as his thumb traced the outline of Carrie’s lower lip.
    “She never planned to get married. She got pregnant. Mitch’s birth certificate gave that part and his real birthday away. The diary we found in the attic when we cleaned it out for her to make a sewing room told us the rest.” The words were burned on her brain until they blurred in front of her.
    “Damn.”
    “She settled on a life she didn’t want and has spent forever being bitter about it.”
    “Have you asked her about the diary and what it means?” The doubt in his words came through. He all but shouted his denial.
    “I don’t have to. I can see it in everything she does. She gave up her dreams and regrets her choices.”
    Austin’s hands fell from her sides. “And we’re not just talking about her right now.”
    Carrie’s heart thundered. She was surprised it didn’t pound right out of her chest. “No.”
    “You’re afraid the same thing will happen to you.”
    All the pressure and all those fears bubbled up to the surface. “I can’t look back twenty years from now and hate myself, and you, for not at least trying the life I’ve always wanted.”
    Everything boiled down to those simple statements. Imagining a life where she hated Austin and their kids for all they stole from her? She couldn’t do it. Couldn’t risk it.
    “Hey.” Spence stuck his head in the door. The red nose and cheeks either meant he’d reached ice-cube level or the fury inside him spiked his temperature.
    From his severe frown, she wasn’t sure she wanted to