Rating: 3.25 stars
Buy Link:
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Length: Short Story


Seven years have passed since Felix said goodbye to his past and embraced his future with Adam. Seven years since he turned his back on London and walked into his new future, hand in hand with the man he loved. Adam’s job, however, has brought them back to England for the holiday season and Felix has a chance to look at his life — then and now — with new eyes.

This isn’t so much a short story as it is an eggnog flavored epilogue to 717 Miles, a Christmas coda, of sorts, where we get to see the happy ending Felix both needed and deserved. In the first book, Felix was tormented, tortured, and so badly hurt that it took everything Adam had to help bring him out of his shell. Today, Felix is older, nearing 30, with an infant son and a devoted husband. His son, a baby given to them by a young woman who was unready to start her own family, is one of the great loves of Felix’s life and has given him cause to reflect on his own absent father.

Adam has always been a caregiver, a warm hearted young man who opened his life and heart to anyone in need, which has given them a life rich in friends, if not in coin. Adam is as devoted to Felix now as he was at the end of the first book, and even though he and Felix fight, they always come back to one another with love. It’s sweet to see their honest devotion for one another and to know that even after seven years, they still look at each other with the googly eyed grins of young men in love.

Felix’s thoughts on fatherhood naturally spring from his own new role as a parent, causing him to reflect both on the man who lent his DNA and the men who helped raise him. It leads to a … well, not a confrontation, but a phone call where Felix has the chance to say what he wants to say to the man who left him behind, and finds himself saying, instead, all that he needs to.

This book feels a bit rushed, to me, and there are some issues with misused words (were instead of we’re), misplaced quotation marks and commas, and a lack of plot or story. While it’s nice to get a glimpse through the window at the lives of two characters I enjoyed reading about, I don’t feel that this book actually enriched the initial story or added anything of its own. I wish it had given me a bit more.