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“The repairs start January second.”

“Scheduling them isn’t enough. Paragraph nine says the approved structural work must actually begin by January fifteenth.”

Crane paused. “Start on time, and our option disappears. Delay until spring to protect Nora Winters’s Christmas business, and Meridian can buy the block for what you paid. Robert Ellison wrote that clause. I wish I could take credit for it.”

The deadline wasn’t news. Crane was calling because the festival photographs had shown him exactly where to apply pressure. Start on time, and I would protect the block by closing Nora’s shop for five weeks. Delay for her, and Meridian could take the block.

There was no version of that arithmetic where I was the man who behaved well.

“Carrying costs have a way of clarifying priorities,” Crane said pleasantly. “Merry Christmas.”

The call ended. Snow tapped steadily against the windshield. Through the glass, Mrs. Morrison opened the barn door for Nora. I put my phone face down on the passenger seat and followed her.

Mrs. Morrison waited just inside the main barn in a quilted jacket, her gray braid over one shoulder. She looked prepared to say no but interested in how hard we would work for a yes. “Mr. Cole. Nora.” Her tone was polite but not welcoming. “The sleigh and portable stalls are in here. The horses are too, unless they’ve learned to open latches.”

The barn smelled like hay and horse and well-kept wood. Two draft horses watched us over their stall doors with the patience of animals already disappointed by people.

“Chester and Maple,” she said, and rested her hand on the nearest nose. “They’ve been pulling the sleigh since 2008.”

“They’re in good shape for it. What does the upkeep cost you?”

“More than it should. Some things aren’t decided that way.”

She led us deeper in, past a wall of harness hung on pegs in an order somebody had thought about, to where the sleigh stood in the center of the floor with a canvas half off it. It was bigger than I’d pictured. It was a working vehicle, with runners bright from use, the body refinished in red with gold on the scrollwork, done recently and done by hand.

“My husband built it in 1986,” Mrs. Morrison said. “The festival used to borrow one from a collector in Salem. Richard said Holly Creek ought to have its own.”

“He was a craftsman.”

“He was a man who thought a town’s traditions should come out of the town.” She ran two fingers along the rail without looking at it. “Every part of it is from here. The wood came off the Henderson property. The metalwork was forged by Frank Donnelly’s father. The upholstery was sewn by the quilting circle, and they argued about the color for a month.”

I reached for my phone without thinking. She saw.

“You’re not here to document a demolition,” she said. “Nora vouched for you. Said you wanted to understand what you’ve been calling inefficiency.”

“She was right.”

“Then put it away and listen.”

I put it away.

She settled onto a hay bale and gestured us down. Nora sat beside her, settling into the familiar story with obvious pleasure. I took the bale opposite and made myself listen, which is not a position I have much practice in. “The first ride Richard ever gave was Christmas Eve, 1986,” she said. “The Henderson boy proposed to the Romero girl somewhere on the back stretch. They’ve been together thirty-nine years, and he still can’t tell the story without her correcting the route.” She let that sit a second. “Which makes this Christmas Eve the fortieth ride. I have been not-mentioning that to the committee since August, in case somebody decided to make a fuss and then had to un-make it.”

“That’s remarkable.”

“That’s the easy one.” She looked at the barn wall instead of at me. “In 1991, a family from Portland brought their grandmother for what they knew would be her last Christmas. She’d grown up in Holly Creek, moved away for work, always talked about the winter sleigh rides from her childhood. We wrapped her in blankets and took the long route past her old house. She died two weeks later, but her daughter told me that ride gave her more peace than anything else could have.”

I studied a nail head in the barn floor, worn shiny by forty years of boots finding the same spot.

I was twelve the Christmas after my mother left. My father moved the tree out of the living room into the front hall, because the living room was being photographed for a leasing brochure and a tree reads as clutter. It stayed in the hall through New Year’s, jammed between the stairs and the closet door, and nobody decorated the back of it. I remember standing behind it once with the lights coming through from the front and thinking that was the better side.

Mrs. Morrison continued. “In 2003, we held a memorial ride for the Pembertons. Their son Michael died in a car accident that November. Twenty of his friends came here and stood in this barn with no idea what to say or do. We took them four at a time. They talked about him in the dark until every one of them had managed to say his name.”

“That sounds like grief counseling with horses.”

“And bells,” Mrs. Morrison said. “Don’t leave out the bells.” She stroked Maple’s nose. “Those kids would never have sat in a county office and discussed their feelings. They climbed into a sleigh. Sometimes people accept help when it doesn’t look like help.”

Then she looked directly at me. “When you proposed a light maze, you were looking at attendance and cost per visitor. You weren’t seeing any of this because none of it is written down anywhere you would think to look.”