Page 3

Around 9:30, the kids at the front window start shouting. I look up in time to see a sleigh go past on Prospect—an actual sleigh pulled by two enormous blond horses, with a man in a brown canvas coat at the reins and a dozen kids running along the sidewalk beside it.

"Kessler," Arch says. He's at the end of my counter with an armload of boxes, watching it go. "He drove Santa down Prospect last night for the tree lighting."

"That wasn't Santa."

"No. And he only takes the sleigh out after dark."

"It's 9:30 in the morning."

"I noticed."

"Maybe he's looking for somebody," I say.

Arch turns his head, and his gaze lands on me and stays there. Then he sets the boxes on my counter and goes back to the front, and I spend longer than I should folding the next corner.

A woman with two little boys in matching hats waits while I wrap a train set. Her younger son has his nose pressed to the front window, watching the engine circle the snowy village. Tiny houses glow along the track, every window lit.

"Isn't it magical?" she asks.

"It's a motor and a loop of track."

She laughs. She thinks I'm joking. I tie the cord and don't look at the little houses again. A lit window doesn't mean anybody gets to stay. I knew that at twelve, and I know it now.

The morning goes on. The line never shortens. Arch moves through the shop the whole time, restocking shelves, finding the last box of whatever someone needs on a shelf in the back, crouching to show a little girl how a music box opens. Every kid who comes in gets something from him—a minute of his attention or a candy cane from a jar by the register—and each of them leaves happy.

He doesn't smile at a single one of them.

Not once. I watch for it.

A woman in a ski jacket stops at my counter around noon, points up at the shelf, and asks how much for the carousel.

"Not for sale," Arch says from three feet away. I didn't hear him come back.

"Everything's for sale at Christmas," she says, laughing.

"Not that."

She shrugs and buys a stuffed moose instead. I wrap it in snowflake paper. When she's gone, I look at him.

"Do you even like Christmas?"

He takes a candy cane out of his pocket and turns it over in his fingers. "Somebody has to run it."

It isn't an answer. It's the most honest thing anyone's said to me since I got to Copper Peak, and I hate that I recognize it.

"That's not the same thing," I say.

"No. It isn't." He sets the candy cane on my counter, right beside the spool of red cord. "You're good at this."

"I've had practice wrapping things that aren't mine."

"Then wrap something for yourself before you go."

"There's nothing in here I want."

He looks at me the way he did in the doorway this morning, with all of his attention at once, steady and certain, as though he already knows how this ends and he's only waiting for me to catch up.

"I'll find it," he says.