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“I know,” Cole said.

“She’s been at it for hours.”

He looked at the window for another moment. The warm yellow rectangle of it against the dark and the snow. Someone working in there in the kitchen, alone, because she was too stubborn to stop and too determined to fail.

He thought about the tree lighting ceremony she was missing. The tree, the rum, the snow, all of it. He thought about Emma’s face when the lights came on. He thought about Zoe tucked against Jackson’s side, one hand resting on her bump, looking up at the star.

Emily should be here for this. This was her town more than it had ever been his.

Then he thought about the anger that still simmered between them. The hurt and pain in her eyes when he’d called her nana a liar, and the shock of her punching him.

All these years later, he found himself wondering: How did they ever let it get like this?

NINETEEN

EMILY

Thursday, December 17th

The kitchen’s back door opened at half past eight, letting in a gust of cold air, and Cassidy with it.

She was still lit up—literally, the LED sweater blazing, the light-up earrings swinging—and her eyes just as bright.

“You should have been there,” she announced, unwinding her scarf with one hand while somehow keeping her thermos upright with the other. “Emily. The tree. I cannot even begin to describe the tree.”

“I’ve seen the tree,” Emily said without looking up from the counter. It was covered with crumbles of brown sugar, flour, and something sticky… either molasses or egg yolk. Emily wasn’t sure which. She’d been too focused on getting the cookies right. The disastrous dozens cooling on her counter proved how well that was going.

“Not this year’s tree. This year’s tree is something else. Mayor Bloomfield completely outdid himself. It’s enormous. It’s the biggest one they’ve ever had. They needed Cole to come with the aerial truck just to get the star on top.” Cassidy set the thermos down on the one clean spot on the counter and started pulling off her gloves. “He had the ladder all the way up and everything. The whole crowd was cheering every time he moved the controls. It was like watching⁠—”

“Cole,” Emily said flatly.

“Yes.”

“You came here to tell me about Cole.”

“I came here to tell you about the tree lighting, which Cole was a part of, yes.” Cassidy looked at her. “Why did your face just do that?”

“It didn’t do anything.”

“It did something. It went all—” Cassidy made a vague gesture toward her own face.

“I’m fine. I’m just tired.” Emily turned back to the counter, where batch number she-had-lost-count was cooling on the rack. “He’s everywhere. That’s all. I couldn’t get through one evening without someone mentioning his name.”

“He did help string the lights on a forty-foot tree.”

“Good for him.”

Cassidy sat on the stool at the end of the prep table and looked at Emily for a moment as if debating what she wanted to say next. She went with, “How are the cookies?”

Emily looked at the counter. At the cooling racks crowded with neat rows of sugar and spice cookies, their edges golden and their tops faintly cracked. At the smears of dough clinging to the mixing bowl and the dusting of flour and cinnamon scattered across the butcher-block surface. Batch after batch had come out looking exactly as they should, filling the kitchen with the warm scent of molasses, cloves, and orange zest.

They were good. Anyone else would have said they were good.

But they weren’t Nana’s.

“Not right,” she said.

The bakery had gone quiet around them. The display cases out front were dark, and the only light in the kitchen came from the pendant lamps above the prep table and the amber glow behind the stove’s small iron door. A stack of used baking sheets leaned beside the sink, while cooling cookies ticked softly as they settled on the racks.