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“Are you crying because kissing is gross, Mama?” Caitlin asks, and Scarlett shakes her head.

“No, Caity-cat. These are happy tears.”

They edge closer, glancing between us.

“Why are you happy?” James asks.

Scarlett nudges me, giving me the okay to tell them, and I crouch down so I’m eye level with Caitlin.

“How would you two feel if I moved to Clover Pines?”

Their eyes go wide as saucers.

“Like stayed here? Forever?”

“And ever,” I confirm, and they both throw their little arms around me, hugging me close. Scarlett crouches down to join in the huddle, and I know this is one of those memories that I’ll come back to again and again.

I had no idea what to expect when I stepped off that plane and drove to Clover Pines all those weeks ago. All I wanted was to make things better for my family.

But now, my family’s a little bigger, and a whole lot better.

I’m feeling pretty damn lucky these days. I guess there was something in all those Clover Pines superstitions, after all.

Epilogue

Scarlett

One Year Later

Caitlin’s laugh echoes through the house as I open the door, accented by the jingle bells on our wreath. Landon’s handiwork. I tug the door closed quickly, trying not to let any heat out of the toasty hallway, and sit down on the bench to swap my comfy snow boots for my slippers.

“I’m home!” I call, hanging up my jacket, scarf, and the green toque Killian picked up at the grocery store last year. James has outgrown his, and Caitlin’s went missing sometime between last Christmas and now, but Killian and I still wear ours.

“We’re in the family room,” he shouts back, his voice wrapping me in a warm hug as much as the words “family room” do. I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to him calling it that.

I detour past his office to put my book away. The bookshelf Killian built for me in here is still mostly trinkets and picture frames, rather than books, but it feels really good to slide this month’s book club choice onto the shelf beside the others. Twelve books in total—some I loved, some that weren’t for me, some that made us realize we could no longer take book suggestions from Fallon—and, all together, they’re a symbol of one whole year of doing things for me.

Killian has a small potted Christmas tree in here, decorated with twinkly gold lights, a few family pictures tucked in between the branches, and a random note I scribbled for him before work one day, where I underlined “I love you”. It’s one of four he’s managed to find a space for inside: this one, our main tree in the family room, the sparkly rainbow tree in the kids’ playroom, and the artificial tree in the kitchen that Landon glares at every time he sees it, because it has the audacity to be made of plastic.

Of course, Killian also decorated three trees outside, and there’s a whole forest of bottlebrush trees dotted across the kitchen island. I swear, every day, I find some new decoration I didn’t know we had. I’m sure I’m going to wake up at some point to a fully decorated tree at the foot of our bed. The Christmas store in Otter Peak loves to see Killian coming.

“This is our time of year. I’m going all out,” he told me when I found him putting up the tree in the kitchen the day after we moved in. In October.

All year is our time of year now, but I love watching him get so excited over everything Christmassy. The house permanently smelling like sweet cinnamon and fresh pine is nice, too.

I didn’t know how the kids would handle moving into a new place after spending their whole lives in our old house, but we’ve done everything we can to make it feel as homey as possible for them. Now that I’m no longer worried about paying our heating bill, they both sleep in their own rooms year-round, but they have “sleepovers” in the den in their playroom most weekends. They’re still best friends, and I’m savoring every second of it.

It’s hard to believe that next Christmas we’ll have a ten-year-old and a six-year-old. They’re growing up so fast. But when I walk into the family room, there’s a Christmas movie on TV, and Caitlin is sitting on the floor in front of the fire, building a horse LEGO set, while James sits beside her with a book in his lap, half-watching the movie, half-reading. Some things never change.

Like the twinkle in Killian’s green eyes as he smiles at me from the couch, or the Irish accent that hasn’t faded even a little bit in the year he’s been living in Canada, when he says, “Welcome home, love.”

He lifts the blanket he’s tucked under and I drop onto the couch, snuggling into him.

“Hi,” I murmur, ignoring the chorus of “gross” when I tilt my head up to kiss him.

“How was book club?”

“It was good. Fallon brought her homemade mulled wine—”