How it started
898 Words
## PROLOGUE
*(Christmas Eve)*
Mara Ellison never planned to drink herself into forgetting.
It just… happened.
It happened the way grief often does—quiet at first, almost polite. A glass of wine because it was Christmas Eve. Another because the apartment felt too large without laughter in it. A third because the snow outside the windows fell in soft, deliberate flakes, blanketing the city in something pure and gentle, as if the world itself were trying to mock her pain.
Christmas Eve.
The lie of it all still burned behind her eyes.
She hadn’t meant to find his phone. Hadn’t meant to pick it up from the kitchen counter where he’d left it charging, screen glowing faintly in the dark like a secret begging to be uncovered. She hadn’t even been suspicious—not really. Just restless. Just lonely.
One notification.
That was all it took.
A name she didn’t recognize. A heart emoji he never used with her. Messages that stretched back weeks—months—each one stripping something vital from her chest. Inside jokes. Pet names. Plans.
*I miss you already.*
Mara didn’t remember sinking to the floor, but she remembered the sound she made—a broken, animal thing she didn’t recognize as her own. She remembered the way the room seemed to tilt, as though the apartment itself were rejecting her. And she remembered the hollow certainty that followed, cold and unmistakable.
He had loved someone else.
Maybe he always had.
By the time she made it to the bar down the street, the night had settled into her bones. The place was dim and mostly empty, decorated with tired strands of tinsel and a crooked Christmas tree blinking half-heartedly in the corner. A song played softly from the speakers—something old and sentimental—and she hated it instantly.
She drank.
She cried.
She stared into her glass and wondered when her life had slipped so quietly out of her hands.
She didn’t know how long she’d been there when a shadow fell across her table.
“You look like someone who wants to disappear.”
The voice was low. Steady. Too calm for a night like this.
Mara looked up.
The man standing there was wrong in every way. Too tall, his presence commanding without effort. Too composed, like nothing in the world could truly rattle him. His coat was dusted with melting snow, his dark hair damp at the edges, his expression unreadable—but his eyes…
His eyes were dangerous.
Not cruel. Not unkind.
Just deep. Dark. The kind of eyes that saw straight through the careful lies people told themselves.
“I do,” she whispered, the truth slipping free before she could stop it.
Something shifted in his gaze. Not surprise. Recognition.
“Then let me help you forget,” he said quietly.
And maybe it was the alcohol. Maybe it was the way Christmas pressed in on her from all sides, demanding joy she could no longer give. Or maybe it was simply the exhaustion of being broken and tired and human.
But Mara nodded.
And the snow kept falling.
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## CHAPTER ONE
*(Christmas Morning)*
Mara woke to silence.
Not the comfortable kind. The kind that rang in her ears and made her chest feel too tight.
For a long moment, she didn’t move. She lay there staring at the unfamiliar ceiling, the faint gray light of morning creeping in through curtains she didn’t recognize. The air smelled different—cleaner somehow, touched with something warm and masculine beneath it.
Her body ached.
Not painfully. Just… insistently. A slow, deep soreness that settled into her muscles and curled low in her stomach, heavy with memory she couldn’t quite grasp. Heat stirred there too—unexpected, confusing—sending a ripple of awareness through her that made her inhale sharply.
Fragments flickered behind her closed eyes.
A bar.
Snow.
A voice.
Strong hands. A look that had felt like being seen and undone all at once.
Mara sat up abruptly, the sheet sliding down her bare shoulders.
Bare.
Her breath caught as she took in the room. Tastefully minimal. Dark wood furniture. A neatly folded sweater draped over the back of a chair. No personal clutter, no photographs—nothing that told her who the man was or how she had come to be here.
No name.
No face she could fully remember.
Only the echo of him.
She pressed a hand to her chest, her heart pounding harder now. Panic threatened, sharp and sudden, but beneath it lay something else—something softer.
Safety.
She didn’t feel afraid.
That unsettled her more than fear would have.
From somewhere outside the room, church bells began to ring. Slow and melodic, rolling through the air like a benediction. She moved toward the window and parted the curtain slightly.
Snow blanketed the street below. The world looked untouched, pristine, as though the night had erased everything that came before it.
Christmas morning.
The city had gone on without her.
Mara exhaled, resting her forehead against the glass. Whatever had happened the night before—whoever she had been with—it had changed something. She could feel it in the quiet ache between her ribs, in the strange warmth still coiled inside her, waiting.
Christmas had come anyway.
And nothing would ever be the same again.
- Writer
