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They stayed like that for a moment.
Then Anita’s voice came from somewhere near the drinks table, warm and slightly wicked, in the way that only Anita could manage at a moment like this.
“Well,” she said, locking eyes with Cole, then her daughter, and then the room at large, “they’ve certainly made up for lost time.”
Emily went scarlet.
The room, which had been holding seventeen years of tension in its collective chest, released it all at once in a wave of laughter.
“Alright!” Madison said, clapping her hands beside the gingerbread table as if she could get their Christmas dinner back on track with a simple diversion. “I believe we have a gingerbread town to unveil!”
Kit was already in position at one end of the white cloth. Emily wiped her eyes, took a breath, and went to the other end. They looked at each other across the covered table.
“On three, Kit.”
They pulled the cloth away together.
The room went quiet again, but this time it was a different kind of quiet. This was awe. And everyone needed a moment to take it in.
Oak Way in miniature. Every shopfront precise and perfect—the Pumpkin Pie Bakery with its little awning and its front window with a little arrow pointing to Operation Sugar and Spice in the back. The Cocoa Corner in vintage teal, the Cinnamon Spice Inn with its window boxes. The hardware store at the end of the row, its door painted red, a tiny wreath on the handle. Royal icing streetlamps. Fondant Christmas lights strung along the rooflines. Powdered sugar snow dusting everything, and in the center of the miniature Oak Way, a gingerbread Christmas tree no taller than Cole’s thumb, decorated with the smallest candy sprinkles he had ever seen.
Cole stood at the edge of the room and watched the town move all at once toward the gingerbread town, everyone talking, everyone pointing, everyone finding their own shop and their own street corner and saying, “Look, look, she got the sign exactly right.”
After that, the evening opened up.
Cole wasn’t sure exactly when it shifted from a Christmas dinner with a revelation in the middle of it to simply a Christmas party, but it happened gradually and then all at once, the way good evenings did. The champagne punch was refilled. Cassidy’s spiced hot cocoa appeared in a large pot from the kitchen, and Emily’s sugar and spice cookies were on every table. Cole watched person after person pick one up and go quiet for just a moment before they started talking again.
Madison’s dad, George, had attempted to bring one of the miniature Highland cows inside for an impromptu petting zoo, but Madison had firmly shot that down. She hadn’t, however, been able to stop him from offering cow-led sleigh rides across the front lawn.
Cole stood there, in the center of it all, and thought about a tin of cookies stolen by two sisters just trying to make life better. About a fence between two properties that a girl used to climb because the gate took too long. Seventeen years of carrying something that had never needed to be carried.
He thought about New York. About his old station, his old crew, the life he’d had there that had been real and good and his.
And he thought about Maple Falls. This small, snow-buried, opinion-heavy town where everyone knew your name and your grandmother’s name and what you’d done in the fourth grade. This was his home.
Emily was still looking at him.
He crossed the room to her.
“Merry Christmas, Whitaker,” he said.
Emily looked up at him with everything she was—fierce and warm and slightly tearful and entirely, completely his.
“Merry Christmas, Cole,” she said.
He kissed her. In front of the whole town, on Christmas Eve, with snow falling softly outside and Captain staring at them through the window.
It was, he thought, exactly right.
FORTY-THREE
EMILY
Thursday, December 24th
Outside, the night was cold and clear and very still. The Christmas lights cast their light along Oak Way, amber and gold and deep red across the snow. The street was quiet now, the sleigh tracks from earlier slowly disappearing in the freshly fallen snow.
And in the distance, the Pumpkin Pie Bakery sat quietly on the corner, its storefront glowing faintly gold from the fairy lights she’d left on. In those walls was the kitchen where Cole had climbed through her window on the night of the blizzard. Where they’d dragged seventeen years of anger into the light and let it go. Where he’d cracked her nana’s sugar and spice cookie recipe, and somewhere between the fighting and the flour, they’d found their way back to each other.
