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He’d called the night after her mother did. He was on the road for the network straight through the holidays, one city after another, and he’d sounded so sorry about it that Nicole had ended up comforting him instead. He’d asked about Drew. He’d asked a lot about Drew, actually. He wanted to meet him so bad she could hear it, and he’d made her promise to tell Drew he said hello. He knew about the letter too. The family lawyers had called him the same day her mother called them, and he’d told her not to worry about it, that they were handling it, and that some girl from Alabama wasn’t getting one dime out of this family. Nicole hadn’t mentioned any of that to her mother.

“She’s going to be nice to you,” Nicole said. “Probably.”

That got him to look at her. “Probably?”

“My mother is always nice. That’s not the same thing as liking you.”

“Great. That’s great, Wright. Real comforting.”

“Tiffany, on the other hand.” Nicole winced. “Tiffany won’t bother being nice.”

“The lawyer.”

“The lawyer whose ex-boyfriend was one of the biggest stars in the NBA and cheated on her for years. With strippers, mostly. So she doesn’t exactly trust athletes. Or men. Or anybody, really.”

“Awesome.” He rubbed a hand over his jaw, and her eyes went to the cut on his cheekbone, healed down now to a thin pink line. Her mother was going to see that. Her mother was going to see that and know exactly where it came from. “What about your grandma?”

Mama Gussie. Nicole honestly didn’t know. Mama Gussie had been born in a time when a Black girl from a good family bringing a white boy home would have been a scandal, and in some places worse than a scandal. “She’s going to feed you,” she said, because that much was true. “Everything else, we’ll see.”

Drew laughed under his breath and shook his head, and then went back to looking out the window.

She looked down at his hand. It was resting on his thigh, big and callused, the knuckles still a little rough from practice, and she remembered him putting that same hand on the seat between them in New York, palm up, and leaving it there until she was ready.

This time his hand wasn’t on the seat waiting for her, and Nicole didn’t need him to make the first move. She reached over and laced her fingers through his.

Drew glanced down at their hands, then up at her. He didn’t say a word. He just squeezed, careful, like he still remembered her knuckles being swollen, even though they’d been fine for over a week.

The car turned off the main road, and the houses started getting farther apart. Then the trees took over, bare for the winter, with the woods running back so far you couldn’t see where they ended. Nicole watched Drew watch them. When the guardhouse came up ahead, with its little peaked roof and a wreath with a red velvet bow on the door, he sat up straighter.

“You have a guard.”

“The neighborhood has a guard.”

“Your neighborhood has a guard.” He watched the man step out, bundled up in a heavy coat, and bend toward the driver’s window. “We had a guy on my street who used to sit on his front steps all day. Mr. Doherty. Nobody paid him, though. He was just nosy.”

Nicole leaned forward so the guard could see her. “Hi. Merry Christmas.”

“Miss Wright! Merry Christmas. Your mama said you’d be coming in today.” His eyes moved from her to Drew and stayed there a second longer than they needed to. Then he smiled and waved them through, and the gate swung open.

The road wound through the woods the way it always had, past long driveways and stone walls and houses set so far back you only caught pieces of them through the trees. In summer you couldn’t see most of them at all. Now, with the leaves gone, there they were, one after another, brick and stone and white columns, every one of them dressed up for Christmas. There were wreaths on every window and white lights wound through the boxwoods, and one house had a lit-up sleigh on the roof.

Drew had gone quiet again, but it wasn’t the nervous quiet from the highway. He was taking it all in, and she couldn’t tell yet what he thought of it.

The car turned into their driveway, and the trees closed in on both sides, and then the drive curved and the house was right there.

Her mother’s decorators had outdone themselves. Fresh garland wrapped every column of the portico, thick with magnolia leaves and pinecones, and an enormous wreath hung on each of the double doors, both of them tied with red velvet bows so big they had to have been custom. Every window across both floors had its own wreath, and every wreath had its own bow, and every one of them sat at exactly the same height. Behind the glass above the doors, the foyer chandelier was lit, and past it Nicole could see the top of the tree, which meant this year’s was even taller than last year’s. Out on the lawn to the left sat her father’s basketball building, brick to match the house, with the slate roof and the tall windows. Somebody had even put a wreath on that door.

Drew leaned forward until his face was almost on the window.

“Holy shit,” he said quietly.

Nicole looked at the house and tried to see it the way he was seeing it. There were two stories of red brick that went on and on, and the ten-car garage around the side. She’d grown up here, so she’d stopped seeing it a long time ago. It was just home.

“Is that—” He pointed at the basketball building. “What is that?”

“That’s my dad’s court.”

“Your dad has a whole building. For basketball.”