I bought the house for silence, but the first photo I posted of the deck went viral in the family chat. Ten minutes later, Mom texted, “Great, Julian and Belle can move in by Friday.”
They showed up with suitcases, a crib, and a locksmith.
I thought I was finally claiming my own Christmas. It turns out I was interrupting a plan that had my name forged all over it.
My name is Faith Stewart.
In my day-to-day life, I am a brand strategist at Redwood Meridian, an agency in Harborview that smells like cold brew and quiet ambition. I build narratives for other people, finding the core truth of a product and spinning it into something desirable. I am good at my job. I am good at taking complex, messy realities and presenting them as clean, intentional, and strong.
I live in a condo that overlooks the water, all glass and concrete. A place I chose because it looks nothing like home.
Home was Maple Bridge, Connecticut. A three-story colonial with precise white shutters and a lawn that looked like it was vacuumed, not mowed. It was the kind of house that magazines photograph in the fall—golden maples and welcoming symmetry.
But symmetry is just a form of control.
Our family was a constellation. Or at least that’s how it felt. My parents, Gregory and Celeste Stewart, were the gravity. My older brother, Julian, four years my senior, was the blazing sun. And I was somewhere else, a distant moon.
Maybe the only one who seemed to see me clearly was my grandmother, Nana Ruth.
The walls of that house told the whole story. They were not walls. They were a shrine to Julian. His first lacrosse stick was mounted in a glass case like a holy relic. Plaques from his Model UN triumphs were polished and hung in a perfect ascending line up the main staircase. His varsity letters were framed.
My achievements lived in a brown banker’s box under the basement stairs next to the holiday decorations we never used. My debate team ribbons, my honor roll certificates, my first published poem from a regional journal—all filed away, kept tidy and out of sight. They didn’t match the decor.
The eraser was a slow build. A habit, then a tradition. It was most acute around Christmas.
Every year, there was a reason.
“Oh, Faith, we thought you had plans with your friends from the city.”
“It was such a last-minute decision to have everyone here, honey. It completely slipped our minds.”
“You’re just so independent. We always know you’re fine on your own.”
These were the refrains of my December. They were the polite, socially acceptable ways of saying, “We did not think of you.”
I can trace the pattern back. Find the origin point.
I was ten. It was a Saturday morning, bright and cold. The kitchen smelled of maple syrup and melting butter. Julian had a big game and my mother was at the stove pouring pancake batter. She was carefully shaping it into a perfect massive letter J. Her focus was absolute, the way an artist studies a canvas.
I sat at the kitchen island waiting. The clock over the stove ticked, each second landing like a drop of water in the silence. Finally, I slid off the stool and got the bread from the pantry. I made myself toast. It was dry and it scratched my throat on the way down, but I ate it alone.
The ticking of the clock was the only sound that acknowledged me.
It only became more refined as we got older.
When I was a teenager, I won a regional writing prize. It was the first time I felt a spark of real, undeniable pride. I came home with the certificate and the small, crisp check for a hundred dollars. My mother was in the kitchen, of course, sorting mail.
“That’s nice, dear,” she said, barely glancing at the certificate.
Her eyes were on an envelope from a university.
“Listen, while you’re here, could you proofread Julian’s college essay? He’s struggling with the conclusion, and you’re so good with words.”
My prize wasn’t a victory. It was a résumé builder for my real job: Julian’s unpaid editor.
But the first great holiday eraser—the one that broke something for good—happened my first year of college.
I was planning to come home, had my train ticket booked a week before. My dad called.
“Change of plans, Faith. We’re all flying down to Palm Beach to see your aunt. The flights are just too expensive to add another one so late. You understand? We’ll see you at New Year’s.”
I understood.
I canceled my ticket. I spent that Christmas in a deserted dorm room eating ramen and watching old movies. In January, I went to visit Nana Ruth, and there it was, stuck to her refrigerator with a bright cartoon magnet: the Stewart family Christmas card.
My parents and Julian beaming, standing in front of the fireplace in our living room. They were wearing matching red sweaters. The photo was dated December 24th. They hadn’t gone to Palm Beach at all. They just hadn’t wanted me there.
Seeing it, I didn’t cry. It was too cold for that. It was the sound of a door clicking shut. Quietly, but finally.
You learn to cope. You have to.
My coping mechanism was hyper-competence. I built a life where I didn’t need to be invited. I stopped asking. I stopped hinting. I stopped leaving room in my schedule just in case.
I started planning my own Decembers with the precision of a military campaign. I booked solo trips to places where snow was a guarantee and family was an abstract concept. I bought myself the expensive bottle of wine. I learned to cook a perfect roast for one. I made my exclusion look like my choice.
It’s a strange thing to have to retrain your own senses.
The smell of oranges studded with cloves—that classic pomander scent—doesn’t mean “holiday” to me. It means someone else’s holiday. It smells like a party I can hear through a closed door. So I trained myself to love peppermint. I drank peppermint tea by the gallon. I bought peppermint bark and ate it directly from the tin. I kept peppermint lotion on my desk at work.
It was crisp, clean, and uncomplicated. It was the scent of my silence, my hard-won solitary peace. It was the smell of a December that belonged only to me.
My work at Redwood Meridian is built on momentum. I orchestrate the ascent. For the past six months, that ascent had a name: Tideline Outdoors. They were a company stuck in the past—all khaki vests and complicated knots, trying to sell gear to a generation that just wanted to feel better for an afternoon.
My team and I were tasked with their rebrand. My strategy was called Find Your Signal. It wasn’t about conquering mountains. It was about finding a moment of clarity in the noise.
We launched the digital-first campaign in late summer. Today was the review.
I stood at the head of the glass boardroom, the harbor-view fog pressing against the windows. The clients were on the main screen, their faces pixelated but clear enough. I advanced to the final slide.
“In conclusion,” I said, my voice crisp in the quiet room, “the campaign metrics have not just met, but crushed our targets. We exceeded the twelve-month projected engagement in ninety days. The new demographic, eighteen to twenty-five, is up over four hundred percent.”
I let the numbers hang in the air. I don’t celebrate in meetings. I present facts.
The facts were: we had won.
My performance review was that Friday. My boss, Arthur, gestured for me to close the door.
“Faith,” he said, “I’m not going to waste your time with corporate platitudes. The Tideline clients are ecstatic. The board is ecstatic.”
He slid a heavy, cream-colored envelope across the desk.
“Your standard raise is in the system for January. This—this is a bonus effective immediately.”
I opened it. Inside was a check made out to me, Faith Stewart. The number printed in stark black ink was eighty-five thousand dollars.
I looked at it until the numbers blurred. It wasn’t a number. It was a door opening. I half expected the ink to blink, to vanish. It was real.
“Thank you, Arthur,” I said. My voice was steady.
“You earned it,” he replied. “Go enjoy your weekend.”
