Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 68293 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 341(@200wpm)___ 273(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68293 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 341(@200wpm)___ 273(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
Gus was watching him, wide-eyed with shock, and he realized that she had been right to warn him off.
“Um,” he gasped. “It’s...”
Adam was watching him eagerly, fork poised over his own sluice of pie.
Gus was leaning back, arms crossed over her chest, looking at them like they were both fools.
Adam took a bite, and Wes saw the exact moment his hopes for a pie that was an homage to his beloved grandmother crumbled, unlike the gluey crust.
He looked horrified, lurched upright, and spat the pie into the sink.
He whisked Gus’ plate away before she could touch it—though she’d clearly had no intention of so doing.
“Oh my god,” he said. “I’m... I don’t know what happened.”
“You can’t bake is what happened,” Gus said, and Wes started to laugh.
It was so damn charming that Adam Mills, never having made a pie in his life, would decide that this pie would be perfection. It was so optimistic, so sweet, and so utterly unrealistic. But what the hell was reality anyway?
“It wasn’t all his fault,” Wes told Gus, to be fair. “I made the filling.”
Gus shook her head slowly, looking worldlier than an eight-year-old had any business being.
“You should stick to your strengths,” she told them both.
Chapter Twelve
Adam
It was three in the morning so of course, Adam was awake.
He rolled out of bed, sighing. This had been going on long enough that he knew there was no utility to lying there and trying to fall back asleep. It never worked, just left him irritable.
He’d been making his way through Fanny and Alexander the last few weeks, so he settled on the couch and cued it up to where he’d left off, three and a half hours in.
The movie was endless and beautiful and Adam let his mind wander along with the camera for a while.
The Christmas decorations in the 1907 Ekdahl house in Fanny and Alexander were grand and gorgeous—the kind of breathtaking drama that Gus must’ve hoped for when she said she wanted them to have the most Christmas lights ever.
eBay had provided a few more boxes of cheap lights, but Adam was quickly reaching the edge of the budget he could reasonably spend on this project and still have money left to get Gus anything for Christmas.
Biting his lip, he opened his Instagram again. There were a number of comments on his previous call to action—people saying they wished they could help, people offering to mail him lights, and people expressing how happy they were that he hadn’t disappeared forever.
It had always given Adam a thrill to see the response to his photographs.
Maybe...
He paused Bergman and pulled on wool socks and a heavy sweater over his pajamas. After a quick peek to check that Gus was sleeping peacefully, he went outside, camera in hand.
He’d been minutes away from selling the camera before they moved. Gus was the one who stopped him, and now he was grateful she had.
Adam plugged in the lights and the house flared to life. Every other window was dark this late at night, so the lights blazed like fire in the night.
Adam backed down his driveway, considering his angles. At first, he shot it to make the lights look lush and luminous. Shot that way, it looked like an ordinary house with cheery Christmas lights—a well-composed shot, but still ordinary.
When he ditched the camera and shot with his phone from the other side, though, the image that emerged was of a bleak house and sparse lights that hardly stretched to cover it, all precariously plugged in to an overburdened power strip. It looked sad and pathetic.
It was unlike any other photo Adam had ever posted. But Adam wasn’t a photographer anymore. He was just a single dad, working at a hardware store whose merchandise he knew nothing about, trying to make his daughter’s Christmas wish come true.
Adam posted the picture.
Hello, everyone! he wrote in the caption. I promised to show you my newest project, and...here it is. It’s not my usual subject matter, but when your kid tells you that the one thing that would really make her happy for Christmas in a new town is to have “the most Christmas lights ever,” well, what’s a dad to do except try and make it happen?
As you can see, it’s not going so well -__-So here I am, asking for your help again. I would be so grateful if you wanted to help me make Gus’ dream come true! You can mail any lights to me here, and I’ll keep posting pics of our progress. My deepest thanks for anything you want to send, and I hope you’re all having a happy December 1st!
“Adam?”
Adam wheeled around, clutching his chest, and dropped his phone.
Wes put his hands up. “Sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Jesus. Hey.”
Adam scooped up his phone, incredibly glad he’d put his camera down when he had, or it would’ve been in pieces.