Snowbound Christmas Wish

Chapter Nine – Berlin Lights

The day after Liam left, time moved wrong.

Too fast whenever Emma glanced at the clock.

Too slow whenever she looked at the empty bed.

She woke up reaching for him and found only cold sheets and a dent in the pillow where his head had been. For a moment she lay still, listening for the familiar rhythm of his breathing, the small sleepy sounds he made when he tried to pretend he wasn’t waking up.

Silence.

Her hand slid over the mattress, tracing the crease where his body had been.

Her phone was on the nightstand, screen dark.

She picked it up anyway.

A message from an hour earlier waited there.

Made it down the mountain. Still alive. Coffee is terrible. Snow already looks wrong without you in it.

She exhaled, the tight band around her ribs loosening a fraction.

She typed back:

Glad you’re not dead. That would ruin my week. Send proof of life.

His reply came with a photo.

A gas station parking lot under a gray sky. His car. A cup of coffee balanced on the hood. His hand in the corner, two fingers raised in a half-hearted victory sign, the knuckles scraped as if he’d punched something recently. Or maybe just a stubborn piece of luggage.

She smiled, even as her chest ached.

She wrote:

0/10 aesthetic. 10/10 for effort. Drive carefully, Hartmann.

Typing dots.

Yes, Ms. Keller. I have things to get back to you for.

She set the phone down before she could start clinging to the screen like a life raft and forced herself out of bed.

It was her last full day in the village.

Tomorrow she would be the one pulling away from the inn, watching it shrink in the rearview mirror of a train window instead of a car mirror. The thought made her stomach twist.

She dressed in layers, braided her hair with clumsy fingers and went downstairs.

The lobby felt more echoing than usual. As if the absence of one tall, sarcastic man had stretched the space between the walls.

Helga stood behind the counter, sorting keys. She looked up, scanned Emma’s face once, and said, “Coffee,” the way some people said “emergency.”

“Please,” Emma said.

A mug appeared in front of her. Strong, dark, slightly too hot.

“Liam?” Helga asked.

“He made it down the mountain,” Emma said. “He hates the coffee.”

“Good,” Helga said. “We have better.”

She watched Emma for another second.

“You can still go to the forest,” she said. “It did not leave with him.”

Emma hesitated.

Then she nodded.

---

The path was quieter without his footsteps beside hers.

Snow had fallen again overnight, smoothing away yesterday’s marks. She had to make her own. Each step felt like a small act of insistence.

At the overlook she stopped, breath puffing in clouds.

The valley lay below, as it had every day. The inn roof. The square tree. The dark green sweep of forest. It looked exactly the same.

It wasn’t.

She pulled out her phone and took another photo. The same angle as the one she had taken days ago, before Liam had grabbed her wrist on an icy edge and pulled her back from a very literal fall.

She typed, without thinking too hard:

Your forest says hi. It’s still on your side.

The reply came slower this time.

In a meeting. Lawyer looks like he eats contracts for breakfast. Will write properly later. Don’t fall off anything.

She stared at the message until the edge of panic that had crept up at the delay faded.

He was busy. Of course he was busy. That was the whole point.

She put her phone away and stayed at the overlook a little longer, letting the cold bite her cheeks and fingers until the sharpness in her chest matched the air.

On the way back she picked up a small pinecone half-buried in the snow. It fit in her palm, rough and solid.

A ridiculous souvenir, maybe.

She closed her fingers around it anyway and slipped it into her pocket.

---

Most of the day she spent packing and unpacking the same things.

Her notebook went into the suitcase, then came back out to sit on the desk. Her laptop charger migrated from bed to chair to table before finally disappearing into a side pocket.

Every object had acquired new weight in this room.

The inn shirt folded on the chair. The coffee mug on the bedside table that she’d drunk from while he watched her over the rim. The dent in the mattress where they had read her article together, shoulder pressed to shoulder, his bare arm warm against hers.

If she looked at any of it for too long, she felt like she might sit down on the floor and dissolve.

So she kept moving.

At some point, Lina knocked and barged in without waiting, as usual.

“You’re really leaving tomorrow,” she said, as if this were a rude choice Emma was making just to annoy her.

“I have to,” Emma said. “Berlin will forget what I look like.”

“Let it,” Lina said. “Stay here. We need someone to write dramatic slogans for the ‘save the forest’ posters.”

Emma smiled weakly. “I’m not sure ‘please don’t ruin everything’ is catchy enough.”

Lina flopped on the bed with the large, melodramatic sigh of someone who expected the world to rearrange itself around her emotions.

“So,” she said. “You and my i***t cousin. Is that a thing now, or was it just a limited edition Christmas disaster?”

Emma sank down beside her.

“I don’t know yet,” she said honestly. “We’re going to try. See what it looks like when there are no pine trees to make everything feel magical.”

Lina studied her for a moment, as if examining a new species.

“He looked less like an empty house when you were around,” she said. “That’s something.”

Emma swallowed.

“Thanks,” she said.

“If he hurts you,” Lina added, “I will throw pinecones at him in court. Hard ones.”

Emma laughed, unexpected and sharp. “Deal,” she said.

They sat in companionable silence for a few minutes, both pretending not to notice the half-packed suitcase.

---

The message from Liam came in the early evening.

She was sitting at her window, watching the sky darken, Berlin ticket open on her phone like a countdown.

His name flashed across the screen.

Survived lawyer. Survived my father. Barely survived their combined disapproval of my life choices. Hearing date set.

She sat up straighter.

And?

Typing dots.

Two weeks from now. City courthouse. Morning session. Judge with a reputation for “hating theatrics,” according to my lawyer. Good news: he dislikes flashy corporate presentations. Bad news: he also dislikes stubborn heirs who change their minds.

Her fingers hovered.

Do you want me there?

This time the dots came almost instantly.

Yes. I hate that I want that. But yes.

Her heart squeezed.

Then I’ll be there.

A pause.

Journalist there for a follow-up, or Emma there for me?

Both, she thought.

She wrote:

Emma first. Journalist… we’ll see. My editor already sniffed blood when the lawsuit came in.

His response was a small balm, even wrapped in worry.

He can have my quotes. Not my heart. That’s already taken.

She stared at the words until they blurred.

Helga knocked just then, saved from either crying or typing back something she couldn’t unsend.

“Dinner,” the older woman said. “You have to eat at least one more time before you go contaminate yourself with city food.”

Emma put her phone down.

“I’ll come,” she said.

---

That night, her last in the inn, was quieter than the ones before.

No big gathering. No music. Just the murmurs of a few late guests in the lobby, the crackle of the fireplace, Lina’s laughter drifting from the kitchen.

Emma went to bed earlier than she needed to, not because she was tired, but because she didn’t know what else to do with herself.

The bed felt wrong and right at the same time.

She lay on her back and stared at the ceiling.

Her phone buzzed on the pillow.

Liam.

Can you talk?

She pressed call before she could overthink it.

His face appeared after a couple of rings. The lighting was terrible – some overhead city apartment fixture casting shadows under his eyes – but it was still his face.

“Hey,” he said.

He was in a white shirt, sleeves rolled up, tie hanging loose around his neck. The top button open. He looked older, somehow. Or maybe just more like the version of him that existed down there, in offices and meetings and family dinners that felt like negotiations.

“Hey,” she said. “You look like you fought a spreadsheet and lost.”

He huffed a small laugh. “Lawyer,” he said. “He is very efficient. Also very fond of the words ‘worst-case scenario.’”

“How bad is worst?” she asked.

“Worst is losing everything,” he said. “Forest, land, money. Best is the judge telling NordAlp to calm down and forcing them back to negotiation. My father prefers the second version. My lawyer is preparing for the first.”

“And you?” she asked.

He looked at her for a moment.

“I am trying not to think about either,” he said. “I’m thinking about you on that train tomorrow instead. It’s less terrifying and somehow more.”

She smiled without meaning to.

“I packed,” she said. “That made it real.”

“I unpacked,” he replied. “My mother put one of those awful old family photos on my nightstand. I put it in the drawer. Real enough for you?”

There it was again, the glimpse into the house he’d grown up in. The one he’d run from and returned to and was now trying to turn into something he could live with.

“What does your mother say about all this?” she asked.

He hesitated.

“She says the forest is beautiful,” he said. “And that maybe my grandfather should never have signed anything without thinking about what his grandchildren would have to live with. But she also says my father’s heart will break if we lose everything, and she has been patching that organ up for thirty years already.”

“And you?” Emma asked. “Where does that leave you?”

“In the middle,” he said. “Like always.”

He shifted, and for a second the camera moved, giving her a glimpse of the room behind him. A narrow bed. A wardrobe. A desk piled with papers. It looked… small. Impersonal. Like a place someone passed through, not lived in.

She realised with a small jolt that she hated him there.

“I wish—” she started, then stopped.

“What?” he asked.

“I wish I could teleport you back to the inn every night,” she said. “Just for sleep.”

His smile turned softer.

“Not for the forest?” he asked.

“Forest too,” she said. “But mostly for the part where you stop sounding like you’re holding your breath all the time.”

He let out a breath that was almost a laugh.

“I’ll take that under consideration,” he said. “Until we develop that technology, we will have to make do with screens.”

She wanted to reach through it, grab his shirt and drag him back into this bed.

Instead she said, “Send me the details of the hearing tomorrow. Time, courtroom, everything.”

“Bossy,” he said again.

“You like that,” she replied.

His gaze dipped, just once, to the neckline of her sleep shirt. It was one of the inn’s, soft and too big, the fabric slipping off one shoulder.

“You are not helpful,” he muttered.

She looked at his loosened tie, the open throat, the bare forearms. “Likewise,” she said.

Heat threaded the air between them, even pixelated and compressed.

“Emma,” he said, voice lower. “We should sleep.”

“I know,” she said.

Neither of them moved to end the call.

“You’re really going back to Berlin,” he said.

“You’re really going to court,” she answered.

“Do you regret the train?” he asked suddenly. “That first day. Getting on.”

She thought of Berlin Central Station. The lights. The noise. His voice behind her. Storm grey eyes. A ticket in her hand and everything she thought she was leaving behind.

“No,” she said. “You?”

He shook his head once.

“Not for a second,” he said.

She believed him.

“Sleep,” she said gently. “You have a lot of worst-case scenarios to survive tomorrow.”

“You have a train to catch,” he replied. “And an editor to terrify.”

“Always,” she said.

“Goodnight, Emma,” he murmured.

“Goodnight, Liam.”

She waited until the call cut before letting herself feel how much it hurt.

Then she turned off the light and lay in the dark, listening to the inn breathe, and tried to imagine the thread between their two small rooms, stretched thin but not broken.

---

The train back to Berlin was the same route she had taken days before.

It did not feel the same.

Onward, the car had hummed with cheerful chaos. Families with too many bags. Children squealing. Couples arguing over seats and kissing between announcements.

Now the carriage felt quieter. Or maybe she was just hearing everything differently.

Emma took a window seat, propped her suitcase above her and placed her notebook on her lap.

Outside, the village shrank. The last glimpse she got of the inn was the roof, a s***h of dark under snow.

Her phone buzzed.

Liam:

You on the train?

Yes. It’s offended that I’m not going up the mountain this time.

Send me a view.

She took a photo of the window. Snow blurred. Tracks stretching ahead. Her own faint reflection on the glass.

Beautiful, he wrote.

She snorted.

You’re biased.

Obviously.

He added, after a pause:

If Berlin feels wrong when you arrive, remember that you have permission to hate it for a while.

And if the city feels right and the village becomes the strange dream? she wrote.

Then you send me a photo of whatever feels right and I’ll learn to like that too.

She stared at the message, something warm and scared uncurling in her chest.

She tucked her legs up onto the seat, balancing her notebook.

For a while she wrote.

Not an article. Not notes for anyone else. Just a line after line of impressions.

The way Liam’s hand had felt when it closed around hers for the first time. The look on his face in the council hall when he said no. The taste of coffee in the lobby while villagers read her article on the television. The feeling of his breath against her neck the first night they had fallen asleep in the same bed.

She did not know what she would do with any of it.

But she did not want to lose it.

Berlin announced itself in stages.

More buildings. Less snow. Graffiti on gray walls. Train tracks weaving like wire.

By the time she stepped onto the platform at Hauptbahnhof, the spell of the mountain had thinned but not broken.

Her phone buzzed again.

Tell me when you get home, he wrote.

She smiled.

Bossy, she sent.

Learned from the best, he replied.

---

Her apartment smelled like dust and old pine needles.

The Christmas tree her mother had insisted she put up before leaving leaned sadly in the corner, lights unplugged, tinsel drooping as if it, too, had given up.

She dropped her suitcase in the hallway and stood there for a moment, listening.

The fridge hummed. A neighbor’s TV buzzed faintly through the wall. A tram rattled past outside.

No crackle of fire. No murmur of voices downstairs. No wind around the eaves.

The difference hit her harder than she expected.

She kicked off her boots, shrugged out of her coat and walked into the kitchen. The mug on the counter had Fabian’s old logo on it, from the company he still worked for.

Without pausing to think, she picked it up and dropped it into the trash.

The sound of ceramic cracking was oddly satisfying.

Her phone buzzed.

Home?

She leaned against the counter and typed with her thumb.

Yes. Tree is depressed. Apartment too quiet. Coffee better than your gas station though.

He replied with a photo of his own.

A city street. Gray sky. Glass building looming. His reflection faint in the door of a law office, tie properly knotted this time.

Mine comes with lawyers, he wrote. Coffee does not help.

She smiled despite the ache.

She typed:

One day we’ll drink something together that isn’t either terrible coffee or stolen inn whiskey.

Deal, he wrote.

She hesitated.

Her mother’s unopened messages stared at her from the top of the screen.

We miss you. Are you coming for New Year’s? Did the mountain fix you?

She sighed, opened the thread and typed:

The mountain didn’t fix me. But it gave me a story. And someone worth trying for. Call you tonight?

Three typing dots appeared immediately.

Someone? her mother wrote.

Emma smiled.

I’ll explain, she sent.

Good. her mother replied. Your father is already narrating your future to the neighbors.

She groaned, texted Liam:

Prepare for my family to exist as a concept.

Too late, he wrote. I already assumed you were raised by wolves and books.

She snorted.

Not far off, she replied.

---

That night, Berlin felt less like a real city and more like a movie set someone had forgotten to turn off.

Emma sat cross-legged on her bed with her laptop open, light spilling over the sheets. Her article was still on the news site’s front page, pushed slightly lower by a scandal in parliament and a snowstorm on the other side of the country.

Her editor had sent her three follow-up emails.

Think we can pitch a longer feature after the hearing.

Any chance you can get an interview with NordAlp directly?

Also: your TV segment went down well. People like your face. Don’t get used to it.

She closed them without answering.

Her phone chimed.

Liam.

Tomorrow: meeting with environmental group that apparently read your article and suddenly remembered we exist. Lawyer thinks they might help. For once, your words are making someone other than me miserable.

She laughed out loud.

Happy to redistribute the misery, she wrote.

A pause.

How’s Berlin?

She looked around.

Same. Different. Loud.

That’s not an answer, he wrote.

She thought for a second.

It feels like a place I live, not a place I belong to, she wrote. But maybe that’s okay for now.

Another pause.

We’re going to have a lot of “for now”s, he wrote.

She smiled sadly.

Then we collect them, she replied. Until we can trade some of them for “soon.”

The dots blinked, then disappeared, then came back.

You keep talking like that and I’m going to drive back to the inn instead of the courthouse, he wrote.

Don’t you dare, she typed. I did not sleep with someone who throws away his own forest defense.

He sent an emoji that looked suspiciously like an offended tree.

She laughed, the sound surprising her.

The fear of distance was still there.

But so was this.

The steady, ridiculous thread of messages across cities. The knowledge that somewhere, in a different bed in a different room under a different roof, he was lying on his back staring at his ceiling too.

She lay down, phone on her chest, and stared at the hairline crack in her own ceiling that she had been ignoring for months.

It looked different now.

Not like a flaw.

Like a map.

Her last thought before sleep took her was not about her next article or the lawsuit or her mother’s inevitable interrogation.

It was about a courthouse two weeks from now, and a man in a suit who would scan the room until his eyes found her in the back row.

And the feeling that, even if the judge decided badly, if the company dug in, if the fight stretched out longer than either of them could see, something had already shifted.

The distance existed.

But so did the line they had drawn through it.