Rowan stepped into the narrow aisle Silas had indicated, and the shop seemed to hush around him, ambient noises muffled as if he’d just slipped on his favorite childhood earmuffs. The light here was softer… not dim exactly, but gentled, like lamplight filtered through old glass. The air held the same cedar-and-paper comfort as the front of the store, yet underneath it was something else: a faint trace of pine sap, sharp as winter mornings, and the suggestion of woodsmoke that made him think of hearths and hands warmed over mugs. The shelves were spaced farther apart. The floorboards creaked less. Even the objects, arranged in careful clusters rather than crowded displays, looked as though they had been given room to breathe.
Rowan moved slowly, conscious of the muffled sound of his own boots, the weight of his own presence. The rational part of him stubbornly tried to insist this was still only a shop. An odd one, certainly. An antique department store with a flair for the uncanny. Coincidences happened. People lost scarves and snow globes and tin soldiers all the time.
But the tree stand had been his dogmatic undoing, if he was honest. Not because tree stands were rare, but because the memory attached to it had come up unbidden, full and vivid. Thomas’s voice, the cold bite of air in Rowan’s nostrils, the soft sawdust that had clung to Thomas’s gloves. Rowan had touched iron and felt a winter that wasn’t this one, one from his past.
He turned a corner and found a small table set with fewer items than the one near the entrance. A single picture frame stood at its center, the glass polished to a clear shine.
Inside the frame was a photograph, one Rowan’s heart recognized before his brain could finish processing it.
The photo was not a generic Christmas scene, not something that could have been just anyone’s. The three figures in it were too familiar, too specific, their faces caught mid-laugh with the careless honesty of people who didn’t know they were being recorded for posterity.
Thomas Ridley sat in an armchair by a Christmas tree that was slightly crooked at the top. Maren leaned against the chair, one hand on the armrest, her head tipped toward Thomas as if she’d just told him something and was waiting for his reaction. And Rowan… Rowan was there, perched on the edge of the couch with his knees pulled up, holding a candy cane like a ridiculous mustache, his grin wide enough to look genuine instead of posed.
He stared at the photograph until his eyes stung.
Rowan reached out as though to touch the glass, then stopped himself at the last moment, palm hovering above the frame. He felt the absurd, immediate fear that he might smudge the surface and ruin the moment inside, as if the laughter were printed on wet paint and could be disturbed.
He didn’t remember taking this photo… That wasn’t quite true. He remembered the moment, not the image. He remembered Thomas insisting they take one “for the album,” and Maren rolling her eyes but standing still anyway. He remembered the flash. He remembered the way he’d felt afterwards, warm and foolish and wholly safe.
What he didn’t remember was what became of the photograph.
A quiet thought slid in, unwelcome and undeniable: It didn’t become yours.
Rowan’s throat tightened. He picked up the frame carefully, lifted it, turned it over. On the back, written in neat handwriting, were three names and a date. The names were simple: Maren, Rowan, Dad. The date was from a Christmas almost two decades ago.
Rowan set the frame down as though it were fragile enough to crack in his hands. So it had existed. It had been kept. But not by him.
He wandered onward.
On the next shelf, arranged as if part of a small, quiet exhibit, lay a stack of envelopes tied together with twine. They weren’t addressed. There were no stamps. Just thick cream paper, edges slightly curled. Beside them sat a pen in a brass holder, its nib bright.
Rowan didn’t touch the envelopes. The sight of them made his palms sweat anyway.
He had written letters before… half-started things that never made it into the world. Drafts that were too raw to send, too heavy to commit to, too honest to risk being read. He’d left one on his desk once for months, meaning to finish it, each day convinced the next day would be the one. Eventually he’d thrown it away. He didn’t remember what he’d written, only the feeling in his chest as he’d watched the paper disappear into the trash: relief, and then immediately, shame.
Rowan backed away from the shelf.
A few steps later he found himself staring at a familiar book without meaning to. It sat open on a lectern, as though someone had been reading it and simply stepped away. The title was embossed in faded gold: A Visit from St. Nicholas. It wasn’t the Ridley copy. The cover was a different shade of green, the lettering a different style, the binding newer than the one he remembered.
But on the page displayed, a small section of text had been underlined in pencil. The line was simple, almost childish in its rhythm.
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work…
Rowan’s breath caught. He read it again, then again, as if the meaning might change.
He spoke not a word…
Rowan thought of all the times he’d swallowed words because they felt too large to be spoken. All the times he’d decided silence was safer than saying the wrong thing. He’d told himself it was kindness: to not burden people, to not make a mess, to not impose.
But sometimes silence wasn’t kindness. Sometimes it was the opposite.
He turned away from the lectern and found Silas watching him from the end of the aisle.
The shopkeep didn’t look as though he’d been standing there long. He had that quiet quality of appearing without disturbance, like awakening from a pleasant dream. His hands were clasped loosely in front of him. His face was calm in a way Rowan found both comforting and slightly unsettling, as if Silas knew the shape of what Rowan was thinking before Rowan did.
Rowan straightened. “I didn’t realize…” He stopped, because he didn’t know what he meant to say. I didn’t realize this place existed. I didn’t realize you were watching. I didn’t realize how much I’ve been avoiding.
Silas’s gaze shifted to the photograph on the table behind Rowan. He did not point. He did not smile knowingly. He simply looked, as though acknowledging a candle burning in the corner.
“People think,” Silas said gently, “that losing a thing means it’s gone.”
Rowan’s mouth felt dry. “Doesn’t it?”
“Sometimes.” Silas tilted his head slightly. “Sometimes it’s only misplaced.”
Rowan’s laugh came out thin. “That feels generous.”
Silas did not contradict him. Instead he asked, quietly, “Have you been generous with yourself, Rowan Monaghan?”
There were a hundred answers Rowan could have given, none of them true in any comforting way. He was generous to others, or tried to be. He was generous with excuses. With distance. With silence. But… generous with himself? He didn’t know what that would even look like.
Silas seemed to accept Rowan’s inability to reply as an answer in itself. “You’ve carried your guilt for a long time,” he said, still mild, as though commenting on the weather. “Perhaps because it’s hardest to put down the things which you yourself picked up.”
“You don’t know that.”
Silas’s eyes softened, but his voice remained steady. “I know what this place collects.”
“And what does it collect?”
Silas glanced along the shelves. “What slips away,” he said. “What’s set down and not picked back up. What’s left behind because the hands carrying it were tired.”
The words landed quietly, but they landed. Rowan looked down at his own hands, pulling them from his coat pockets, fingers still curled around nothing.
Silas took a small step closer, stopping at a distance that felt deliberately respectful. “Some people leave,” he said, “not because they’re unwelcome, but because they’re afraid of how much they want to stay.”
Rowan continued to stare at his hands as Silas’s words sunk in. The words reached back into years he’d never properly examined and tugged on a thread that tightened around his chest.
He remembered leaving for college and feeling the giddy kind of freedom that comes from new streets, new faces, new rooms where no one knew him. He remembered coming back the first Christmas afterward and finding the Ridley living room unchanged, the tree in the corner, Thomas still calling him “lad” with the same easy affection.
He remembered how good that felt. And how frightened, in some private place, he’d been of wanting it. Of needing it.
He remembered telling himself he shouldn’t become too attached. That he was only a guest, and had only ever been. That he had his own mother, his own life. He remembered a silent, foolish promise he’d made to himself: that he wouldn’t lean too hard on what wasn’t technically his. He remembered keeping that promise even when it hurt.
After college, he’d visited less. Not because the Ridleys asked him not to come. Not because Maren shut him out. Simply because each visit made him feel how much he’d missed, and that feeling was sharp enough to cut.
So he stayed away. A year became two. Two became… more.
Maren had called sometimes, early on. Texts, too. Little updates. Silly photos. Look what Mum found in the attic. Do you remember this? Are you coming home this year?
Rowan had answered, just not with the same warmth, not with the same immediacy. He’d told himself he was busy, that he’d call later, that he’d make it up in person when he had more time. Time, of course, had never arrived in a neat package.
Then Thomas grew ill. Rowan learned about it in fragments. He knew there were appointments. He knew there were scans. He knew Maren’s voice sounded tired on the phone.
He had meant to visit. He had meant a great many things.
When the call came, and he could still hear that call if the room was quiet enough, Rowan had promised he’d be there. He’d said it without thinking, because it was what a person should say in that situation. And he believed, in that moment, that he meant it. Then… he’d returned to his life and let the world swallow his intention. Work, plans, the logistics, the dreadful, numbing delay between grief and action, the way time kept moving even when something essential had stopped.
And then it was too late.
Rowan’s vision blurred. He blinked hard and realized he’d been standing still for longer than he thought. Silas remained in front of him, patient as the falling snow.
“I should have…” Rowan began, but his voice failed on the edge of the rest of the sentence.
Silas nodded once, slow and careful. “Yes,” he said, not harshly. “You should have.”
Rowan felt heat rise in his face. He waited for judgment, for condemnation. For the kind of moral weight his own mind insisted he deserved.
But Silas’s expression did not sharpen. Instead it held something like compassion, and something like insistence.
“Tell me,” Silas asked, “when you think of Maren Ridley… what do you fear most?”
Rowan stared at him. The question was unfairly simple, and he knew the answer at once.
“That she’s done. That she’s done with me,” Rowan whispered.
Silas did not react as though this was dramatic. He treated it as a fact Rowan had been carrying, heavy and quiet.
“And… what if she isn’t?” Silas asked.
Rowan shook his head. “I don’t know how to find out.”
Silas’s gaze flicked toward a shelf behind Rowan. “Sometimes,” he said, “we don’t find out by asking a question. We find out by choosing a different way of being.”
Rowan wanted to argue. He wanted to insist he was trying. He wanted to insist it wasn’t that simple.
But it was that simple, in the way the hardest truths often were: he had to show up. Not perfectly. Not grandly. Just… at all.
Silas stepped aside slightly, giving Rowan the aisle again. “Keep going,” he said. “You’re closer than you think.”
Rowan hesitated, then moved forward, passing Silas as though passing a signpost rather than a person. The shelves ahead were fewer now, arranged in smaller groupings. The store felt less like a maze and more like a path. He stopped at a small shelf where a single item rested on a folded square of cloth: a familiar watch, the kind with a compass.
Rowan’s chest tightened again. Not because he recognized it in precise detail, because he couldn’t have described it from memory. He recognized the feeling attached to it: his mother’s hand closing around his wrist as she’d fastened the strap, her tired smile softening, her voice saying something like, There. Now you’ll always know when and where you are.
He didn’t pick it up. Not yet. The watch felt like something he wasn’t ready to face, not until he could speak honestly about the people he was afraid of disappointing. Rowan backed away, leaving the watch untouched.
As he moved deeper into the warm, quiet heart of Morrow & Reed, the thoughts of the photograph and the scarf and the tree stand trailed behind him, at the back of his mind. They were invisible reminders. Proof that he had belonged once. Proof that he had been kept in someone’s memory.
He still didn’t know what Maren felt. He still didn’t know what words would be enough. He still didn’t know if the gift he sought could carry all the meaning he wanted it to. But for the first time that night, Rowan Monaghan understood the shape of his own fear, and the shape of the choice waiting on the other side of it.
He took one more step forward, into the quieter corner Silas had promised, and let the store’s lamplight gather around him like a held breath, like the pause before a story turns.
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