Snowed Under (Aspen Peaks #2)

26. Madeline

I was officially only two weeks away from my finals.

Two weeks away from what had to be the hardest semester in the history of the world—yes, including aerospace engineering programs and rocket science. Two weeks away from having a break between semesters so I could lift my head from the snow, take a deep breath, and enjoy the view before diving right back in.

Considering I hadn’t been able to dedicate as much time to studying as I probably should have; I texted my mom last night to see if they could watch Piper after my morning shift. Her response was an extremely dry sure, but I knew she wasn’t feeling 100 percent after her physical therapy appointment. But as much as I loved Piper, focusing on any kind of work besides her while she was around felt nearly impossible, and I was crunching down enough as it was. If I performed poorly on any of my finals, and I was left with a GPA below a 3.75, then my scholarships would be gone. As would school. As would any hope I had of a future where I could provide enough for these kids.

I loved my job. But the reality was, I couldn’t do this forever. Besides, when I was little, I’d always said I wanted to be a nurse, and once I finished up my last two semesters, I would get to achieve that goal and maybe find that piece of myself that I felt like I was missing.

Pulling into my mom’s driveway always made my blood pressure rise a little. Enough for me to notice. Like all of the cells in my body were standing at attention in preparation for some form of passive-aggressive conflict bound to come spiraling my way.

“Ready to see Gram, Pipes?” I shifted to park.

Piper stuck her arms out wide, reaching outward in her way of saying up, while she actually said “peeeassse” in a long, drawn-out squeal.

I hopped out and rounded the car to her side, unbuckling her from the car seat and settling her on my hip since the snow was still pretty rough from last week’s storm and Piper didn’t have snow boots that fit her well enough. Her feet were still that of a one-year-old, so the boots I’d bought her in the summer on clearance in hopes that they’d fit her now were far too large.

I didn’t bother knocking, considering they knew I was on the way fifteen minutes ago, and walked right in to the kitchen, where my dad stood by the counter. His palms dug into the sockets of his eyes while a mug of hot coffee steamed below his face. Various papers were scattered around the countertop that Mom started scooping up once she heard the door close.

“Hi, Gram!” I said in a toddler voice, raising Piper’s hand and waving it for her.

“There’s my girl!” Mom turned around and made grabby hands at the two-year-old on my hip. “Gram wasn’t feeling good before, but I am happy to see you. I made you some dehydrated fruit. Yes, I did.” She squished her cheeks and took on a baby voice. “Some bananas for that belly and strawberries for that nose.” Mom continued poking and squishing all over her granddaughter before setting her down and patting her on the bottom twice. “I’ve got some markers and paper for you in the living room, I’ll be right there.”

Piper ran away without even a glance back at me. I snorted. “I think she’s sick of me after all the time we’ve been spending together.”

“Well.” Mom wiped her hands on a spare dish towel. “Most kids aren’t as close with their aunts as she is. She’s probably just realizing it’s normal to be this way with distant relatives.”

She didn’t mean it as a dig. I didn’t think. Maybe Cooper was right, and I did tend to see the best in people, but I really did think my mom genuinely was unaware of her emotional surroundings. How I was anything but distant to Piper and how, even though I had never been pregnant and I’d never given birth, these kids were mine.

You are valuable.

He left them for you.

“Okay.” I hummed, figuring it would be best to skirt right past that.

“So.” I turned to my dad, who was still looking at the floor like he hadn’t slept in days. “Thanks for watching Pipes. I shouldn’t be too long, but I packed dinner for her just in case. I have four finals to go through, but I may just study for two today and two another day, if you’re free again this week.”

“Okay.” Mom hummed right back.

Our dance began. The one where neither of us said how we really felt. The waltz of I think it’s weird how you never processed your son’s death, and you take it out on your only kid left, who was always more of a backup anyway and…well, I didn’t know what her side of that looked like, because she’d simply never said it.

So again, I moved on. “Deadlines for next semester signups are on Wednesday.” They both stayed silent, looking at me like I wasn’t speaking English here. “I got my classes all sorted… just need”—you know, the money—“to make a payment for finalizations.”

Mom’s throat cleared. “Oh, oh. Right. How much by…Wednesday, you said?”

“Yeah, Wednesday. And it’s seven thousand this semester, since we have labs that I’ll have to attend.”

I still wasn’t 100 percent sure how I could handle in-person classes, but somehow, I would pull it off. Maybe Olive could watch Piper while she was home with her baby? Or if my parents would help out a couple of days a week to—

“I can’t do this, Eloise. You have to tell her.” Dad suddenly stood from his silent spot and turned the corner to the living room, where I could hear Piper jabbering random noises.

“Tell…me what?” I turned back to Mom, watching as she anxiously wrung her hands around her tea towel.

“Okay.” She started to pace a little. “Okay.”

“Okay?” I asked.

“Okay,” she parroted.

“Are you going to tell me or—”

“The money’s gone.”

My ears began to ring. Like a gun had been fired from right beside me, and my body was mid-recovery. The money’s gone. She didn’t mean—I mean, there was no way. It wasn’t possible.

“What money?”

“The…nursing school money. It’s not there.”

My tone turned sharp as I tasted copper in my mouth. Numbers started compiling in my mind. Hours of time worked. The perfect amount saved, down to the penny. All the times I’d wanted to buy new shoes or get my nails done but thought, no, this needs to go to the school fund. Years. So many years of my life had gone into that account.

“What do you mean it’s not there? Twenty thousand dollars doesn’t just fly away.” My breathing was heavy and uncontrollable. No amount of counting or sensory intake was going to fix this. I couldn’t—oh my gosh—I couldn’t breathe.

“No.” Mom took a deep breath, her hands still wringing as she paced. “No, it didn’t fly away. It was taken out.”

“For what?” I snapped.

She still wasn’t looking at me. Meanwhile I was dissecting her like a high school biology class frog, waiting to find any idea of is this real or not in her.

“For my surgery last year…and the half bathroom remodel over the summer.”

Last year? My chest felt tight. This room felt tight. I’d never been claustrophobic before, but I imagined it felt a whole lot like this. Like I could strip out of my leggings and sweatshirt and rip these boots off, then run out into an empty snowy field and still feel like the world around me was too small.

“Last year?” My voice croaked, and I hated that I was on the verge of tears. “You mean…you took the money out starting last year? Why? If you had told me you needed help, I could’ve—” I cut myself off, because we both knew I didn’t make enough to cover twenty thousand dollars. But I could have figured something out. Spoken to insurance companies, talked to the hospital about getting on a payment plan. I don’t know, something.

“I could have helped” is what I settled on. “You knew I was going to need it for school. You knew I would need it to finish out my last two semesters. Why would you—”

Again, I cut myself off. Because right at that last sentence, Mom stopped wiping her hands on the dish towel. She stopped pacing. And her eyes were dead focused on me. My ears suddenly stopped ringing.

“Oh my God.” It hit me. “You didn’t think I was going to finish school, did you?”

The guilt on her face was enough of an answer. Now I was the one pacing. “You, you…those times where I mentioned that Aspen Valley was always hiring, and you shrugged it off. When I talked about plans of bringing Piper to daycare when I started working. All of it…it wasn’t because you thought it would be hard to get hired.”

I felt like a detective in a cozy mystery who’d finally solved the last clue to why there was a hand in the librarian’s desk drawer. Only instead of being cozy, it was just a nightmare replaying in my head that I couldn’t wake up from.

“You didn’t think I was going to ever graduate. Did you? That’s why you took it out.”

Now I was stopped, directly in front of her. Our eyes met for what felt like the first time in months. This was the first time in…a year, I supposed, that we were truly seeing each other. And whereas I’d always hoped that one day, mom and I could be truly face-to-face with no walls up, I’d never thought it would be like this.

“You…you just struggled so much in the first semester. And I know school gets harder with each class. Those were just your basics, and you were so stressed and tired…I didn’t see it working out.”

I didn’t realize there was still a small part of me hanging on to the hope that maybe I was wrong in my assumptions. But hearing her confirm it…knowing that neither of them—Dad included, really—believed in me felt like a letter opener to my chest. They’d never believed in me. Not as a student or a guardian to Charlie and Piper. Hanging by a frayed rope, every fiber torn apart, the final thread snapped. And I fell with it.

“I struggled because I had a ten-month-old who cried all night long. Because I was learning how to mix formula and sing lullabies and change diapers and pack lunches and do homework and work a job. All while trying to process the fact that my brother and my only real friend were dead, buried six feet under. And it felt like he took me right down with him.” I was sobbing now. Fat, angry tears forcing their way down my cheeks and onto my sweatshirt. “And my fiancé left me mere weeks before school started because he wasn’t ready to be a father, and yet was with another woman a month later.” A woman he ironically had a baby with now. I digress. “And on top of it all, I had parents who criticized my every move and decision, but weren’t willing to help. I was strapped into parenthood with duct tape and told to hang on while every single good thing in my life was ripped out of my grasp. Meanwhile, you were over here pulling money out of an account that I worked to build for ten years to remodel your bathroom.”

Somewhere in the distance I heard a door close, and I knew it was my dad taking Piper to the basement so she wouldn’t hear me in my hysterics. I could be grateful for that one thing.

Mom sucked in. “The tile was—”

“The tile?” I sounded like a raving lunatic, but I didn’t care. All the times I’d avoided conflict, telling myself it wasn’t worth it, that fighting back never amounted to anything good, they all piled on top of one another and fueled me further. “I can’t believe you—No. You know what? I can believe you. Because this is something only you would do.”

I reached over to the counter and grabbed my keys, turning to the door. I had to get out. I couldn’t be in the same room as her. I couldn’t breathe in the air around her. If selfishness was a disease, I prayed it never caught me.

“Madeline, please. I’m so sorry—”

“For which part?” I cried out, and I hoped she knew they were angry tears and not sad ones. She wasn’t allowed to see my sad tears. “For lying to me, or for spending the money you swore would only ever go to my schooling?” Her mouth opened to answer, but I shut it down. “Or for never allowing me to even bring up Will, forcing me to process and grieve entirely alone? Or for putting so much restraint on me and my ability to raise the kids that I feel like I’ve been choking for the last two years? Or how about for never being there for me as a kid? For not showing up to science fairs or school assemblies or soccer practices?” My hand curled around the doorknob. “Or how about for wishing the other sibling had been the one in the car that night?”

The last one landed harder than the others. I could see it in how she winced, visibly pulling herself back two feet. Hurt slashed across her face with the ugliest scar. Good. Maybe she knew a pinch of how I felt.

She’d never said it aloud. Neither had I. We hadn’t needed to. But I knew it as well as she did. Sometimes we both wished Will was here instead of me.

So I opened the door and let myself out, ignoring distant calls of my name.

I wasn’t sure what it said about me that my first instinct was to call Cooper. But I was in no mood to dissect the meaning behind it now.

“Hey, I was just thinking about you,” he answered, and at that alone, I knew I’d called the right person. The only person. I was just thinking about you.

“Hi.” My voice was wobbly and uneven as I fought desperately to sound okay.

A pause. “Baby, what happened?”

His voice was so soft it made me cry even harder, sobbing and chest heaving as my gut twisted tighter. It was the first time he’d called me anything other than Madeline, and that made me cry even more too.

“I…I can’t…” I can’t even get the words out. Where did I even start? What was I supposed to even say? Everything felt so fuzzy, and my tears were blurring the road lines just recently scraped of snow, and the car next to me was blaring “Hey Ya!” as if the world hadn’t stopped spinning just minutes ago.

“Are you driving?” he asked, tone soft but clear.

“Y-yes,” I sniffled.

“Okay, come to the lodge. Finn can cover my class. I’ll meet you in the lobby. Please don’t cry while you’re driving. I need you to get here safely, all right?”

My breath in was so unstable that I thought I was going to break into harder sobs, if it were even possible. “Okay,” I practically wailed.

“Whatever is going on is going to be worked out, all right? Come up here safely to me, and we’ll go from there.”

I nodded, but then realized he couldn’t see me, so I gave another sniffle and an “All right.”

Maybe I should have cared more about the fact that my coworkers and people I see on a daily basis were going to see me walking into the lodge ugly crying. But I had a one-track mind, and it was strictly focused on finding Cooper, wrapping my arms around his thick frame, and resting my head over the steady beat of his heart.

By the time I pulled into the lodge’s parking lot, parking directly next to Cooper’s SUV, I couldn’t honestly remember even driving here. I was so thankful for my autopilot turning on, because my mind was like a scratched record, repeating the same words over and over. School. Spent. Didn’t think. Will. Kids. School. Repeat.

Cooper said he’d meet me in the lobby, but when I was halfway through the parking lot, I saw him pacing outside the main doors. And when he glanced up, he looked at me with so much concern in his eyes I really thought I might melt into the asphalt and become one with the snow. He practically ran across the parking lot, ignoring a truck that honked at him for getting in his way, all the way to me, those dark brown orbs looking straight to mine, searching.

Two strong hands gripped my upper arms, and he bent his knees so we were at level height. “What happened? Did someone hurt you?”

I nodded. “I—my mom.”

His eyebrows dipped down in confusion, and I knew I wasn’t making any sense, but I couldn’t force it out, and gosh, he was looking at me with so much concern that I honestly couldn’t take it. I didn’t know if anyone had ever looked so worried over me, and somehow, it was healing all these little micro-cracks in my heart that I hadn’t even realized existed.

“Let’s go inside, okay? I’ll get you warm and we’ll talk.”

I nodded, and he wrapped one arm around my shoulders, guiding me inside. The automatic door flew to the sides, and I was grateful it was somewhat busy inside, because no one was staring at us. They were focused on their own conversations instead. Good. Maybe no one would hear me sobbing in the employee break room.

Except Cooper wasn’t guiding me to the break room. We were going straight down the hall to a separate set of elevators.

“Where are we going?”

“Alex has an office up here that he never uses. I have the door code, and I go from time to time if I’m stressed or need a break from people.”

I sniffed and tried to muster a smile, but it was laid on a poor foundation, so it came out pathetic. “You need a break from people?”

Cooper seemed pleased at me making any attempt at humor. “Yes, I, of all people, still need breaks from society.”

The elevator doors swung wide open, and we stepped onto the tiled floor. A gold railing pressed into my behind as Cooper pressed the white button stamped with a 17 in gold font.

“Even Mr. Charming needs social rest?”

He looked over and gave me this sweet smile. One that said so much more than words ever had. “Please, Mr. Charming is my father.”

I snorted a little, which quickly turned into sniffles, which manifested itself into quiet sobs as I remembered why I was here in the first place.

“It’s okay. I promise. Whatever she did, we can figure it out together, yeah?”

Unless he had a magical way of making seven thousand dollars by Wednesday, I doubted it. But his voice comforted me enough that I didn’t question him when the elevator dinged, signaling our arrival.

The doors opened to a short hallway with a single door at the end. It had a silver door handle and a dated keypad resting above it. For the owner of an entire ski lodge, it seemed…simple.

Cooper let go of my shoulder just long enough to type in a code. I turned my head to avoid seeing it. Being here alone felt like an invasion of privacy. And whereas I’d never met Alex Graves and doubted he cared if a random employee knew a code to his unused office, I did know that this used to be Cooper’s grandfather’s space. And I respected him enough to turn my eyes away from the key code being typed in.

“We can go in here. I promise no one really uses it except me, and I’m 90 percent sure one of my cousins comes up here to use her weed pen before her shifts on Thursdays.” Cooper opened the door, and I followed him in.

The office was less of an office and more of a million-dollar penthouse that would be featured in a Jelly Roll music video or used in the background of a Forbes “Sexiest 30 under 30” magazine.

The expansive windows were the first thing that caught my eye. How could they not? Stretching from floor to ceiling, they offer an unobstructed panorama of snowcapped mountains in the distance. Pristine white peaks, dusted with fresh powder, glistened under the soft winter sunlight. The slopes scattered with skiers gracefully carving their way down the mountain, tiny splashes of fluorescent colors making their way onto a white canvas.

The office space was sleek, modern, and masculine. Forest-green walls adorned with wooden bookshelves lining the wall to the left. A mahogany desk that sat facing the window with a brown leather chair behind it. A familiar laptop—Cooper’s—sat on top of it. A well-maintained, or possibly fake, fiddle leaf fig sat next to it. To the side, plush, oversized cushions sat on a white couch. The perfect mix of cozy and fancy. Like someone would drink a glass of scotch here with one of those spheres of ice that take twenty minutes to perfect. A coffee table that matched the desk stood in front of the couch, holding a small, elegantly decorated Christmas tree with tiny white ornaments, a bowl of pine cones, and a few scented candles that filled the room with a gentle aroma of cinnamon and pine. Cooper. It screamed. Masculine, cozy, beautiful, pine. Cooper.

“Wow,” I whispered. “I can absolutely see someone using a weed pen here.” I trailed through the room, past Cooper and to the windows, to look out at the expansive view. If I thought the sitting room was the height of this lodge, I was poorly mistaken.

“Right. Aurora would use a weed pen in a gas station bathroom all the same, so I suppose it doesn’t do the view as much justice.” He sighed and shut the door behind him, locking it.

“It’s incredible.”

“Glad you think so.” Our voices sounded so light, like we were standing on a frozen lake, unsure of what was going to be heavy enough to crack the ice and make us fall through.

“I can see your grandfather sitting here.” I rested my hand on the leather chair, smiling at the worn area where someone’s tush had spent years on it. “Suits him well.”

Cooper nodded and walked over to the mini-bar—because there was a freaking mini-bar. Before bending over and pulling out two tiny Fiji bottles. “It does. I used to come up here with him all the time.” He stretched out a long arm, pointing to the TV hanging above the couch. “He’d let me watch anything I wanted as long as I was quiet and still.”

It wasn’t hard to envision a tiny Cooper, dark hair scattered on his head, lying on his belly, staring up at the TV, with his grandfather at the desk behind him. It also wasn’t hard to believe Cooper was the kind of boy who had to be forced to be still. Even now, he was constantly moving. Fidgeting, playing with the ends of my hair, bumping my knee. Never still.

“Thus his love for Belle was born.” I sniffed.

“That’s right, in this very room.”

He moved to sit on the pristine couch and patted a hand to his lap, legs spread in invitation. I accepted, briskly walking over and sitting down on his thighs. If I hadn’t been so upset, maybe I would have noticed how strong he felt underneath me. How someone could be so soft and yet like a freaking brick wall was beyond me. All I knew was that I’d never sat somewhere more comfortable than Cooper Graves’s lap.

I audibly moaned a sigh when his hand went to my hair, tugging and playing with just the right amount of pressure. “You want to talk about it?”

No. Yes. I wanted to scream into a pillow but also cry and listen to The Greatest Showman soundtrack and eat fondue.

“It’s a long story,” I explained.

“I have nowhere to be.”

I looked back at him over my shoulder as his chin dipped to rest on my upper back. We adjusted so I could see him better, and he pulled back so he could look me in the eye.

“Essentially, my parents and I had this joint savings account for my schooling. I’ve been saving since I was sixteen, and they would match whatever I saved, so that way I’d have enough one day. So we’d be paying for all of my classes that way and—” I sucked in a breath, shakily forcing the rest out. “They spent it all. All of it. Drained it entirely.”

Cooper went still beneath me. “All…wha—why?”

“For their half bathroom renovations and some medical bills. But you know what?” I let out a dry, bitter laugh. “That part isn’t even what hurt the most. There’s always more money to be made. I could have figured something out, helped them out, gotten a different job, something. It was that they didn’t even tell me. Didn’t question it at all, really. Just took it out without a second thought, and you know why? Because they didn’t think I’d ever finish school.”

Cooper’s hand on my thigh tightened while I talked, just letting me know he was there. It made it easier for everything to slip out.

“She said I’d struggled so much in my first semester, which was only a few months after everything went down. Said she didn’t see me finishing the schooling out. So they took some out a year ago, then again this summer. They just never told me ’cause they thought I’d drop out by now.”

My tears came right back as I said it out loud.

“Madeline, I…I’m so sorry. I’m struggling with words because I have a lot to say, but they’re your parents, and I can’t tell whether calling them selfish pricks makes me the asshole?”

I shrugged. “They are selfish. On top of a lot of other things.”

He nodded. “That’s true. What if, and don’t say no immediately, what if I helped out? How much do you need for this semester?”

I did exactly what he assumed I would. “No.”

“Madeline—”

“Cooper.”

“Just let me explain. If it’s less than ten thousand, we can make a deal. I’ll write a check, and all you have to do is be my girlfriend. It’s simple. No interest.”

I snorted. “My value as a girlfriend is ten thousand dollars?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s worth much more, but I have always been one to strike up a deal.”

“Well.” I wiped my nose with the end of my sleeve. “Even if I let you do that, which I never would, I didn’t tell you the rest.”

He dipped his chin to my shoulder.

“I think the worst part is…I was relieved.” And just like that, a weight lifted from my chest.