Page 115

Thursday, December 24th

Cole hadn’t realized he was holding his breath until his grandfather spoke, then Cole took a deep inhale.

The room seemed to move in slow motion, like it did when he ran into a burning building. His eyes assessed everything: Lily’s hand pressed to her mouth, Emily frozen beside him, his grandfather standing by the fireplace with his glass on the mantel and a story waiting to tell.

“Tell us,” Cole said. To Lily first, then to his grandfather. “Everything.”

Lily looked stricken. The breezy confidence she’d walked in with had dissolved completely, replaced by the expression of someone who had just realized the ground she’d been standing on wasn’t where she thought it was.

“There were two sisters, Rebecca and Anna. Do you remember them? They moved years ago, but we were friends,” she said. “In the Girl Scout troop. They were—they were good kids. Really good kids.” She swallowed. “They just never had much. Rebecca was always looking out for Anna. Making sure she had enough to eat, that sort of thing.”

The room didn’t move.

“The day of the bake-off, they came into the bakery. They saw cookies cooling on the counter and they took them. They didn’t know—” Her voice cracked slightly. “They didn’t know it was the competition batch. Rebecca just saw cookies and thought of Anna and they took them.”

Cole could swear he heard Emily’s heart beating beside him.

“When the accusations started,” Lily continued, “they were terrified. They wrote a confession letter. They were going to come forward. But then—” She looked at Mr. Alders. “Then the grown-ups made up. And the sisters thought it was over. They thought if nobody was angry anymore, they didn’t need to say anything.”

She stopped. Pressed her lips together.

“They told me,” she said quietly. “A few weeks after it happened. They made me swear—a pinkie promise, which when you’re ten is—” She shook her head. “I kept the promise. I wasn’t in your friendship group, Emily. I didn’t know how bad the feud had gotten. I just knew the adults had sorted it out, and I thought that meant everyone had. And then Cole moved away.” She looked at Cole. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea it was still—that you two were still⁠—”

“It’s okay,” Cole said. Because it was. Lily had been a child keeping a child’s promise, and he wasn’t going to put that weight on her tonight.

He turned to his grandfather.

“That’s the gist of it. Except one small point… I saw them,” Mr. Alders said simply. “Those two girls, going out the back of the bakery with the tin. I knew what they’d done. And I knew why,” he continued. “I knew who their parents were. I knew what was going on at home.”

He paused.

“They were sisters, looking out for one another. I wasn’t going to be the one to get them in trouble for that.”

“Jerry came to me a few weeks later,” Mr. Alders continued. He used the name with the easy familiarity of a man who had known someone his whole life.

Cole could almost picture them as younger men, sitting side by side solid that neither of them had imagined anything could truly break it.

“He said he was sorry. Said he’d been wrong to accuse me, and he knew it.” Mr. Alders looked toward the fire. “Jerry wasn’t going to let a tin of cookies ruin fifty years of friendship. He didn’t know the truth when he apologized. He just knew he’d been wrong to accuse his friend.”

Cole glanced at Emily.

Her arms were folded tightly across her middle, but the posture no longer looked defensive. It looked as though she were holding herself together. Her eyes stayed fixed on his grandfather, bright beneath the warm glow of the Christmas lights.

“He found out later,” Mr. Alders said. “His wife worked it out, I believe. But by then, it didn’t matter. We’d already made up.”

He looked at Cole. Then at Emily.

“What I didn’t know,” he said; his voice had something in it that Cole had never heard from his grandfather before—regret, genuine and heavy, “was that you two hadn’t made up the same way we did.”

The room was very still.

“I didn’t know the years of it. I thought when Jerry and I sorted things out, it was sorted for everyone. I thought—” He stopped. His jaw worked. “I should have paid more attention. I should have talked to you, Cole. To both of you. And I didn’t, and for that—” He looked at his grandson with eyes that were bright and steady. “For that, I’m sorry.”

Cole crossed the room.

He didn’t say anything. He just put his hand on his grandfather’s shoulder and left it there, the way his grandfather had put his hand on Cole’s shoulder a thousand times—at the hardware store, at the kitchen table, in his driveway when Cole left for New York. The gesture that meant everything they didn’t have words for.

Mr. Alders reached up and covered Cole’s hand with his own.