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Cole had never wavered on that. Not once. But believing it and proving it were two very different things. If he could uncover what had really happened, he could finally clear his grandfather’s name.
Because that accusation hadn’t only stolen his family’s reputation. It had stolen Emily.
Two kids who’d promised they’d always be there for each other had become strangers, divided by a lie neither of them had been old enough to stop.
If he’d uncovered the truth back then…
Maybe he wouldn’t have lost the girl who had once been his whole world.
NINE
EMILY
Sunday, December 13th
Emily was dead on her feet. You’d think that when she and Nutmeg finally got home, she would’ve gone straight to bed, pulled her feather duvet over her shoulder, and kissed the day goodnight.
But her brain wouldn’t quit.
Not sleeping the night before, except with her archnemesis, which she was fighting hard to forget, a quick power nap, and then spending fourteen straight hours making a bazillion gallons of minestrone, and loaf after loaf of fresh-baked bread, on top of all her regular baked goods, would do that to a person.
But even the coziness of her apartment couldn’t calm her nerves. The condo complex had its own generator, which meant heat, lights, and the ability to pretend the world outside wasn’t buried under four feet of snow.
She’d decorated it white and silver for Christmas, looking like it belonged in a Pottery Barn catalog but felt lived-in rather than staged. A white faux-fur throw was draped across the couch. Silver mercury glass votives flickered on the mantel alongside miniature white birch trees dusted with glitter. A garland of eucalyptus and dried orange slices hung above the kitchen window. Everything was soft, warm, and exactly where she wanted it.
This was her space. Nobody else’s. No firefighters allowed.
Except, Cole lived rent-free in her head.
It only took two seconds of quiet, two seconds of not stirring or kneading, for her mind to start replaying every lurid detail from the night before.
What in the hell were you thinking?
She asked herself that for the fortieth time.
Her mind answered that too, because her mind was a traitor. It flashed to Cole’s hands fisted in her hair. The hard planes of his stomach under her palms. His thighs, muscular and solid, beneath her. The way he’d filled her so completely she’d lost the ability to form words, just sounds.
She’d never been with anyone like that. Not even close. The sheer size of him, the way he’d moved, the way he’d held her like she weighed nothing.
She could still feel his hands on her if she stood still too long, which was why she hadn’t stood still all day.
Never again.
She could promise herself that.
But until then, she needed company. She needed noise. She needed something, anything, to fill the silence before her brain took her back to that kitchen floor one more time.
She also needed to make elf hats.
The idea had come to her early back in the bakery kitchen, somewhere between the third batch of bread and the fifth person asking what they should call themselves.
Because they needed a name. If they were going to organize a town-wide relief effort with rotating volunteers and snowmobile deliveries and a sign-up sheet, they needed something better than “the people helping out in the kitchen.” Something fun. Something that would make people want to show up and do the work and feel good about it.
Emily had been elbow-deep in bread dough when it hit her.
“Operation Sugar and Spice,” she’d said out loud to nobody in particular. Her nana’s cookies were called the sugar and spice cookies, and they were working in what had once been her nana’s kitchen, and somehow it just fit perfectly.
Emily had texted Cassidy immediately, because if anyone was going to take this idea and run with it until it crossed the finish line wearing sequins, it was Cassidy.
