“Yep. Right before Christmas break.” She rocks back and forth on the barstool, and I’ve got a weird urge to stand next to her in case it topples.
“I don’t see why not.”
“You promise?”
“I’ll be there with bells on.”
“I’ve never seen you wear bells.” She squints at me. “Wouldn’t that be loud?”
“Not actual bells,” Chloe laughs, already pouring eggnog.
“It’s an expression,” I say. “Back when people traveled by wagon, the horses wore bells. If you ran into trouble, the helpers took the bells as payment. So arriving ‘with bells on’ meant no trouble at all.”
“My mom showed me a wagon game. I died like five times from dysentery.” She hops down and races back to the living room.
“Points for trying to sell a classic,” I tell her.
“I try.” She laughs. “It’s hard to compete with the things out there these days.”
I nod and soak up this moment: Owen put Elf on the television, my siblings and Phoebe wrestling with lights, my wife next to me pouring eggnog into Christmas mugs.
I’ve held so tight to old Christmases that I almost missed the chance to make new ones.
thirty
CHLOE
The last coupleof weeks have been filled to the brim—sessions, editing, farm chaos, school drop-offs, cocoa refills—and a house full of Wheelers and Christmas magic I didn’t ask for. Somewhere in all of that, I forgot my family was coming to visit.
I can’tbelieveI forgot.
Worse, I can’t believe I never told Aiden it was even on the calendar. In my head, forgetting is careless and careless is how you become a problem. This isn’t something small. This is myentirefamily descending into his space in two days.
Like a freight train with Texas license plates.
I’m sitting on the edge of the bed in his room—my room—staring at my phone like it might sprout a new notification that says: JUST KIDDING, WE’RE NOT COMING.
This is probably the first time in years I’ve wished I still lived in Enchanted Hollow so I could employ the use of a fairy godmother. A literal one. Because I need a serious magical intervention here.
And Storywood Ridge doesn’t have that sort of magic.
Two days.
They’ve got no clue I got married.Again.
And they’ve got no clue that Aiden is the groom.
My parents have never liked surprises. They like plans. They like timelines. They like “responsible choices” and “stability” and “maybe don’t marry a man if your life is on fire, Chloe.”
They’ll be thrilled.
I grab a throw pillow that’s got a cute little red truck with a Christmas tree in the bed and scream into it.
The worst part is that it wasn’t supposed to matter. My parents live in Texas. This farm is in Colorado. My life was split neatly into two boxes:beforeandafter, and my parents existed safely in the “before” box, where they could worry about me from afar, and I could tell them I was fine.
Whether or not that’s actually true.
I never expected my worlds to collide.Even though this was on my phone calendar. (I might forget a lot of things, but not of this magnitude.) And now they’re the one thing that could blow our arrangement to pieces.
