Amelie let herself be drawn back into the world of jazz, of wine, of good conversation—surprisingly with people she didn’t recognize, or who didn’t recognize her. She’d grown and changed over the years, and it stood to reason that Mackinac Island had, too.
Maybe going back home wasn’t so scary.
Sometime after one that morning, the bar area of the bed-and-breakfast was empty save for Pascal, Amelie, and the bartender, Ralph. They cleaned up, playing music on the speaker system, then ate crackers with cheese and listened to a final record together. When Ralph retired to his room upstairs, Pascal unlocked the cabinet up front to retrieve Amelie’s backpack, which she’d nearly forgotten about. She considered telling Pascal that this was one of the best nights of her life, but she didn’t want to sound pathetic.
He led her upstairs to a bedroom that overlooked the street—and offered a full view of the apartment her mother had once lived in above the Caraway Fudge Shoppe. It was strange. How many times in Amelie’s childhood had she looked from thatother window across the street and into this one? She tried to remember what the bed-and-breakfast had been back then. Another hotel, surely. That, or a restaurant. But it didn’t matter now. It was Pascal’s place.
Amelie got ready for bed and slipped beneath the covers with her phone in her hands. When she brightened it, she found another text from Willa, sent hours and hours ago. There was a photograph of their mother’s bicycle in a location that was not their former home. Amelie sat upright in bed, sure as anything that it was their mother’s. Obviously, it had been sold.
Amelie hated the idea of tourists coming to Mackinac and riding around on their mother’s bike. Something would have to be done.
Maybe because she was tired, and perhaps because she’d decided nothing mattered anymore, Amelie wrote a text back to her sister, threw her phone to the edge of the bed, and fell right asleep. The wintry winds off Lake Michigan swept down Lake Shore Drive and chilled the bed-and-breakfast to the bone. But soon, morning would come and cast buttercream light upon the freshly fallen snow, just as it always had before.
Chapter Ten
Willa
December 2025
Willa woke up at dawn after a topsy-turvy night of ragged sleep. Bleary-eyed, she went to the kitchen and made herself a pot of coffee before returning to her bedroom and lying back down again. When sleep wouldn’t find her, she reached for her phone and saw a text.
Amelie: The fudge shop is closed.
Willa snapped up at attention. It was the first correspondence from her sister in ages—and it felt cryptic. Caraway Fudge Shoppe never closed around the holidays. Never. But if for some reason it had, why did Amelie know about it?
Willa rushed to her closet, put on a pair of long johns, two sweaters, her multiple scarves (for protection from other islanders), and went to the garage. Without letting herself think too hard, she wheeled her mother’s bike to the mostlysnow-cleared road and rode back downtown. As she went, she passed multiple carriages and other bike riders, all catching the morning light. It was nearly eight by the time she reached Lake Shore Drive. When she saw the corner where Caraway Fudge Shoppe waited—the same corner it had been on since her great-great-grandfather and great-great-grandmother had founded it—her heartbeat intensified. If Amelie was wrong, there was no telling who Willa was about to run into. Sweat bubbled on the back of her neck.
When she realized how abandoned the shop looked, she stopped short in the middle of the road, her boots square on the pavement. A carriage almost ran her over.
“Sorry!” she called, pedaling to the sidewalk, where she hauled her bike up and stood before the glass display window. If this were a typical day in the life of this fudge shop, she would see someone ducking back and forth in the back kitchen, making slab after slab of fudge, preparing for a hard day of sales ahead. But there was no fudge in the display case, and no one was in the kitchen. There was a thick layer of dust on the front display case, and zero—absolutely zero—Christmas decorations.
It felt like the end of the world.
Willa squeezed the handlebars of her mother’s bike and thought hard about Amelie, about the Caraway Fudge Shoppe, about everything that had happened and everything they’d tried to run away from. Inexplicably, she was back. She should have done everything in her power to avoid returning here. She should have quit her job, for goodness’ sake. This was too much.
But before she could make up her mind about what to do next, her phone rang. Panicked, thinking it was maybe Amelie, she pulled it out of her pocket and read: GAVIN. Her heart sank. She answered it anyway.
“There she is. My brilliant director,” Gavin said. Willa wondered if he was making fun of the fact that she said“brilliant” so much on set, if that had gotten around. She flushed.
“Hi, Gavin,” she said. “How are you?”
“Doing much better now that I’m talking to you!” Gavin said.
Willa continued to stare glumly into the dark window of her family’s fudge shop. She wasn’t in the mood for Gavin’s bounce, his so-called capitalistic joie de vivre.
“How is the cabin?” Gavin asked.
“It’s nice,” she said. “Thank you for arranging that.”
“Anything for you,” Gavin said. “Hey, listen. Are we still on for later?”
Willa searched her mind for understanding, then remembered she was supposed to meet the Christmas Festival Committee that afternoon to discuss her ideas and plot next steps. But she hadn’t known that Gavin would be there.
“We’re still on,” she said, sounding far more confident than she felt. “Three o’clock.”
“I’m on my way up now,” Gavin said. “Tell me. Is it bursting with Christmas spirit?”
Willa took a moment to look around at the elaborately decorated downtown, the garlands swirling around telephone poles, the Christmas trees in every shop window (except for the shop that mattered, of course). She twisted around to see a blue bed-and-breakfast across the way, one that hadn’t been there during her childhood. There was a French flag flapping from the porch, looking slightly ragged in the winter air.
