Neither of them went home for the holidays — Beckett's relationship with his father too strained for a comfortable visit, Rae's father unable to leave the bar during its one genuinely profitable season of the year — and the decision to spend the break together in Ironbrook, just the two of them, carried a specific significance neither fully acknowledged out loud until Christmas Eve arrived and they found themselves alone in the small apartment with nowhere else they needed to be.
"This is the first Christmas I haven't spent at the bar since I was six," Rae admitted, stringing a small strand of lights around the apartment's single window, a decoration Priya had insisted on gifting them after declaring the apartment "aggressively devoid of holiday spirit."
"Do you miss it?"
"A little. My
