Page 78

“The bagels are delicious, but this is even better. Don’t worry, I’ll be sure to let your mom know.”

“I know your mom’s from the city, but I don’t know if I could do it. I mean, vacation, absolutely, but full-time?” Emily made a face that said EEK!

Cole chuckled. “It’s a different world. Part of me loves it. The energy is like none other. It could be three a.m. and you can go out for a steak dinner. Or go ice skating in Central Park. Christmas shopping down Fifth Avenue. Time just exists differently. And the fire station is a brotherhood.”

Cole’s face grew solemn.

Emily knew the sacrifices the New York City Fire Department made. She might be too young to remember September 11th, but she knew Cole’s dad had been there at Ground Zero. Cole later said that’s what triggered his family to move to Maple Falls. His mom wanted to keep them all safe, and there was nothing safer than a small town in the Midwest. But in the end, she’d simply missed the big city too much.

“I was thinking,” Cole said, after a moment. Finishing a forkful of pancakes. “About the investigation. I know it’s in the past, but I’d still like to clear my grandfather’s name, find out⁠—”

“I want to keep going,” Emily interrupted him.

He looked at her.

“Not because I think your grandfather did it.” She turned her coffee cup in her hands. “I don’t, promise. But the truth is still out there, and it’s been out there for seventeen years, and your grandfather has been carrying an accusation that wasn’t true for all of that time.” She met his eyes. “I want to find it. For him. For my nana. And because it’s right.”

Cole looked at her for a moment. Something settled in his expression. “Do you want to come up with a plan later? Combine everything that we know?”

“It’s a date.” Emily clinked her coffee cup with his.

He looked at her with that expression—the unguarded one, the one she was still getting used to seeing on his face. She looked back at him and thought, I really hope I can trust whatever this is. She hated that she went there, but her past didn’t give her the most confidence that people she cared about would stick around.

“I guess I better get going to the station,” Cole said.

“Yeah, I’m going to work here a bit and then head over to the inn. Did you hear about the Christmas dinner?”

“At the inn?”

Emily nodded. “Madison is opening it up to the whole town. Anyone whose family can’t make it in because of the weather, anyone who doesn’t want to travel, anyone who just wants to come. The whole town is invited. Kit and I are building the gingerbread Maple Falls to unveil that night.”

“I hadn’t heard, but I wouldn’t expect anything else from this town.”

She walked him out front.

It started as a goodbye kiss and became something considerably more than that, her hands in his coat, his arm around her waist, neither of them moving toward the street with any real conviction. The cold was theoretical. The station and the inn were theoretical. Everything was theoretical except this, which was very immediate and very real and entirely the fault of whoever had decided to put them in the same town.

When they finally broke apart, they were both slightly out of breath.

“Go,” Emily said. “Before I keep you here all morning.”

“Would that be so bad,” he said.

“Go, Cole.”

He went. Three steps down the porch, he turned back and looked at her in the way he’d been looking at her since the kitchen last night, like she was something he was still getting used to having and wasn’t inclined to look away from.

She was still watching him when Zach’s truck turned onto the street.

It slowed.

Cole saw it at the same moment she did. He looked at the truck. Looked back at her. Raised one hand in a brief, completely unhurried wave at Zach’s windshield.

Then he kept walking.

Emily stood on her porch and watched Zach’s truck idle at the corner for a long moment before it drove on.

Her phone buzzed.