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Jenny kind of thought that if good old Ebenezer Lisle was anything like his descendant, he probably had cheated in that game the way the Careys had always claimed.

Anyway, all she wanted was her children happy. Truly happy.

That left her with one remaining child to sort out now, and unsurprisingly, he was probably the hardest yet. Her marvelously stubborn and deeply wounded Dallas.

It was a well-known saying that a person could only be as happy as their unhappiest child. And Jenny had always known that Dallas was that child.

Even as a boy, there’d been something about him. He had those dreamy eyes, the same blue as his siblings’ but with that faraway look in them. It hadn’t really surprised her that he was the one who left as soon as he could, joining the Army and going directly into Ranger School—meaning, getting the hell out of Cowboy Point. And Montana.

Getting himself as far away from his family as possible.

She hadn’t taken it personally. Or not too personally—she was a mother after all, so she always felt it when her babies were far.

But Jenny had known that the person he really wanted to get away from was his father. Or the ghost of his father, maybe. Tennessee and Dallas had seen maybe a little too much of Patrick growing up and she knew, to her shame, that they hadn’t seen enough of her when they’d needed her most. There was nothing that Jenny could do about that now. She couldn’t change the past, much as she wished she could.

What she could do was try to make up for it.

Especially since, these days, Dallas liked to tell everyone who asked—meaning, mostly his mother—that he was allergic to emotion.

Good thing Jenny knew the real source of that particular allergy.

She’d sent the reason for Dallas’s years-long symptoms an anonymous postcard back in the summer. Just to formally announce the opening of Dallas’s little passion project that he’d poured himself into over the past few years. Or had used to hide from the world once he moved back to Cowboy Point.

Though Jenny had learned that this was an opinion her son did not like very much when she shared it. Not that Dallas liked much of anything, as far as she could tell—which he would say was because he’d gone numb in the Army.

Maybe he had. But that wasn’t why he’d stayed that way.

Tonight, as Jenny and Peyton sat on her couch laying bare all of their children’s deepest issues because that was how they expressed their love for them, she was beginning to think that she’d made a mistake with that postcard.

Maybe not everybody in the world sat around thinking about the past as much as Jenny and Peyton did. Maybe the woman she’d sent that postcard to, who’d married her son while he was an Army Ranger and had likely seen sides of him Jenny hadn’t, had no desire whatsoever to come find him again.

“That was a heavy sigh,” Peyton observed from her place on the couch, piled beneath a set of blankets.

“I was hoping…” Jenny shook her head. Peyton knew what she was hoping. “I just can’t imagine who’s going to dig inside my poor Dallas and find out where he keeps that broken heart if it’s not the one who broke it in the first place.”

“It’s the Christmas season,” Peyton pointed out. “It’s supposed to be magical. That means anything can happen.”

Jenny hoped that was true this year. For Dallas in particular.

And later on, when she paused the movie so she could go back into the kitchen to get herself a cup of water because a wise woman stayed hydrated when the wine was flowing, Jenny stopped still and stared out the window.

It was a dark night and the snow was swirling, though it wasn’t collecting much on the ground. The lighthouse’s powerful beam swept over everything in its usual rhythm, the intervals making the dark seem darker in between, and sweeter when the light danced through.

But what caught her attention was a pair of headlights making their way very, very slowly up Lisle Hill.

It was a late hour to be out, and especially in what looked like, from where she was standing, a vehicle without proper snow tires or chains. She couldn’t think of anybody she knew who’d be driving up the side of a mountain in December without being properly outfitted.

Though she supposed she was going to have to get used to that, because times were changing. Dallas had finally opened up his bed-and-breakfast, his passion project finally complete. A lighthouse had been standing on the top of Lisle Hill as a silly little folly that one of the original Lisles had built to impress his bride from back East who missed the sea. It had stood there, nonfunctional and empty, for as long as Jenny could remember.

But Dallas had decided that he could restore it to its former glory and better yet, turn it into something more than a relic of a long-dead man’s foolishness. Dallas had been working on it for years now, whenever he wasn’t doing his shifts in the family-run General Store, which was another holdover from Cowboy Point’s gold rush past. Jenny wasn’t the only one who’d assumed that he would never finish. That he would rattle around up there on the top of the hill until he was part of the legend of the lighthouse in his own right.

Instead, he’d finally opened the place as of Thanksgiving, though as far as Jenny knew, no one had actually stayed there yet.

Maybe this was the very first guest. That was exciting enough, but as Jenny peered out at the car, watching it slip too much as it navigated the unpaved dirt road beside her house, she saw something else. Something that was possibly even more exciting—

But she had to be sure she wasn’t seeing things.

She walked back out into the living room, and waved at Peyton to come look out the window too.