Marcy smiled. “Honey, you don’t have to be so secretive. Everyone knows you want to go back to school.”
Kate couldn’t explain how special the moment was, and she didn’t want to try.
December descended on Kennebunkport like a Victorian Christmas card desperate to prove its authenticity. The first weekend of Christmas Prelude brought the kind of orchestrated chaos that the town had perfected over decades. Kate threw herself into preparations partly from habit, partly to avoid thinking about how everything was about to change.
She stood on the porch before dawn on the first Friday of December, watching the town transform. Every inn competed for the most elaborate decorations, but Whaler's Landing had found its niche, what Dani called “coastal elegance” rather than Victorian excess. They had twenty-four couples arriving, every room booked through both Prelude weekends.
The tree crisis felt almost quaint. Dani panicking about Brackett's Farm being late with delivery. The twelve-foot balsam that finally arrived smelled like every Christmas of Kate's childhood, when Pop would bring home trees too large for the space and her mother would make them perfect anyway through sheer determination and strategic pruning.
As evening approached and guests gathered for the tree lighting countdown at Dock Square, Kate found herself standing apart, already practicing distance. The collective countdown, “Ten! Nine! Eight!” reminded her of New Year's Eve, of time passing, of deadlines approaching. She was almost thirty-six. In graduate school, she'd likely be the oldest student by a decade. When she finished, she'd be thirty-seven, maybe thirty-eight if she pursued the doctorate. The window for children would be closing.
The thought surprised her with its urgency. She'd never imagined herself as a mother, had assumed the inn was childenough. But watching the families around her, seeing the wonder on children's faces as the tree blazed to life, something shifted. She could see it suddenly, a child of her own at this same spot, teaching them to see both the magic and the machinery behind it.
Saturday's Hat Parade brought the controlled chaos Kate had learned to navigate. Mrs. Porter's gingerbread village hat was magnificent in its absurdity. The parade itself felt like the town's personality made visible, trying so hard to be authentic that it achieved authenticity through sheer force of will.
Kate watched her siblings manage everything without her orchestration. Tom handling logistics, James the technology, Dani, along with Ryan, conducting the entire event. They didn't need her, not really. The inn would survive her partial absence. This realization should have stung but instead felt like freedom, freedom to want more, to be more, to have more.
Sunday brought Santa by lobster boat, Charlie Brennan delivering his insider information about the unofficial stop at their dock. The children gathered there went wild with joy, and Kate watched one little girl, maybe four, crying with happiness at Santa's wave. The child spun in circles in the kitchen afterward, looking for her mother.
Kate saw herself in that spin, remembered being that age in this same kitchen. But she also saw something else, a possible future. Her own children in this kitchen.
They’d share the ocean and their world on the water with their children. Ben teaching them how to drive a boat, Katie showing them how to tie knots the way Pop had taught her. She’d point out tide pools and anemones, explaining ecosystems while also teaching them to read ice, to know when it was safe, when to wait.
She retreated from the crowd to sit at the kitchen table, the table that had held her entire life. Her homework as a child, hermother's pie crust, Pop's fishing flies, that made her mother complain at least once a week. Soon she'd sit at different tables in Biddeford, learning what her mother had wanted to learn. But she'd also need to preserve time for her table on the ice, that folding chair in her fishing shack where she made sense of the world.
That evening, after the guests had settled and her siblings gathered in the kitchen for their debrief, Kate stood before them ready to test the waters. She wasn’t ready to announce anything about school just yet.
“What would you all say if I got accepted to UNE to finish my studies? If I did get accepted, I’d most likely start in January.”
“I think it would be great,” Dani said.
“I’d still work the inn, it’s just…”
“Stop thinking the worst. You can do both,” Ben said quietly, kissing her temple.
“I'll need Sunday mornings,” Kate added suddenly. “For ice fishing in winter. Early. Before breakfast service. I can't give that up.”
“Of course,” Tom said, understanding immediately. “I’ll be sound asleep under nice warm blankets.”
Dani smiled. “Katie, you don't have to negotiate for time to breathe.”
But she did, Kate thought later, alone in her room. She had to protect it, schedule it, fight for it. Time to think on the ice. Time for the inn. Time for school. Time for Ben. Time for, maybe, children. Making lists and organizing her schedule was what she knew how to do.
She pulled out her mother's letter from the attic, read again about the flutter in Elizabeth's belly that changed everything. Her mother had been twenty-one, forced to choose. Kate was thirty-five, trying to choose everything, and running out of time for some choices.
She thought about Ben, patient Ben who'd waited so long already. Would he wait through graduate school for children? They hadn't discussed it, but she could feel the conversation approaching like weather, inevitable, necessary, potentially destructive or rejuvenating depending on how they weathered it.
Outside, Kennebunkport glowed with holiday magic. Next weekend would bring Prelude's second act. After that, January and the beginning of her divided life. She tried to imagine it, driving to Biddeford in the pre-dawn darkness Monday mornings, coming home Thursday nights smelling of formaldehyde from the lab, Friday mornings at the inn dealing with whatever crises had accumulated, Sunday mornings on the ice before anyone woke.
And somewhere in that schedule, maybe, the possibility of a wedding. She could feel Ben building toward it, the careful attention that meant planning. They'd marry at the inn, of course, probably in summer when the gardens were full. Then children, if time allowed, if her body cooperated with plans made so late, if they could figure out how to add one more thing to a life already blessed.
Kate stood at her window, looking out at the harbor where ice would form in a few weeks, thick enough to trust by January. She pressed her hand against the cold glass and made a promise to herself and to whatever ghosts lingered in these walls.
She would be greedy where her mother had been selfless. She would take the education and the inn and the marriage and the children, maybe, and definitely the ice fishing. She wouldbe a student at thirty-five and a mother at thirty-eight and a doctorate at forty if that's what it took. She would have her Sunday mornings on the ice even if she had to be there at four a.m.
The inn creaked its approval around her, or maybe its warning. Tomorrow would bring more Prelude preparation. But tonight, Kate held all her possible futures at once, the degree, the wedding she could feel coming, the children who might never exist, the Sunday mornings on ice that absolutely must exist, and refused to release any of them.
Her mother had given up her dreams for love. Pop had given up his peace to protect that love. Kate would give up nothing. She would be exhausted and divided and probably overwhelmed, but she would not choose between her desires.
