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No one has hung a stocking for me in years.

Not since before Shiloh was born. Not since… hell, I can’t even think of the last time.

My throat feels tight. I loosen a tie I’m not wearing.

Another picture arrives.

Shiloh is sitting on the floor surrounded by red and green paper. They’re making paper chains. Dozens of loops of them, piling up around him like snowdrifts, a glue stick clutched in one fist.

Noelle is beside him.

She’s wearing leggings and an oversized red sweater. Her brown hair is pulled up on top of her head, with something white on her cheek.

Flour, maybe? Or glue?

Behind them, through the doorway to the kitchen, I can see cooling racks on the island.

She’s laughing. Head tipped back, eyes squeezed shut, one hand pressed flat to her stomach like she can’t hold it in.

I zoom in.

Then immediately stop.

What the fuck am I doing?

I toss the phone onto the bed like it’s burned me. It bounces once on the duvet and lands face-down.

I get up. Walk to the window. Stare at the parking garage.

I’m thirty-nine years old. I have a contract. A very clear, very well-drafted contract that says exactly what this is and exactly what it isn’t.

I pick my phone back up and close the picture.

The air conditioner kicks on. Somewhere down the hall, a door slams and someone laughs.

Thirty seconds later, I open it again.

This time, I don’t zoom in.

I just look. Shiloh and the paper chains. Noelle with flour on her face. And my name, crooked and glittering on a stocking above the fireplace in a house I haven’t been inside in almost a month.

Eleven more days. Not that I’m not counting.

I’m absolutely counting.

chapter

seven

Noelle

I learn several things about my husband without ever meeting him.

Most of them from Dottie, who dispenses information about Maverick the way other people hand out candy: freely, generously, and usually while I’m trying to do something else.

One, he works too much.

“Always has,” Dottie says, rolling out pie crust with a rolling pin older than I am. “Even as a boy. Mowed half the lawns in the county by the time he was fourteen.”