Chapter One
The trouble with Christmas Eve in Bethany was that everyone else seemed to have somewhere warm to be.
Mara Whitfield stood in the doorway of The Wick & Wonder at half past five, watching the last of the foot traffic drift past her window without stopping. Across the square, the big blue spruce the town put up every year was lit in its usual chaotic glory — half the bulbs white, half colored, because nobody had gotten around to replacing the strand Warren Ferris’s grandson had dropped off the ladder in 1998, and by now it had become tradition rather than an oversight. Snow fell in the unhurried way it did in this part of the county, more decoration than weather, dusting the shoulders of carolers and the roofs of parked cars and the striped awning over Della’s bakery two doors down.
It was, by any reasonable measure, a beautiful evening. Mara had sold four gift boxes of cinnamon-pine candles, a beeswax nativity set, and — to Old Mr. Alvarez, who bought the same thing every year and pretended not to remember doing so — a hand-poured candle in a jar shaped like a snowman. She should have felt good about that. Instead she felt the particular hollowness that came from watching other people’s evenings begin while her own simply continued, unchanged, into another night alone above the shop.
She flipped the sign to CLOSED and stood a moment longer anyway, arms crossed over her cardigan, looking at the tree.
“You’re doing the thing,” said Della’s voice behind her, muffled through a scarf and the bell over the door. “The window-staring thing. I can see you doing it from my window.”
“I’m closing up.”
“You’ve been closing up for ten minutes. That’s not closing, that’s brooding with your coat on.” Della came to stand beside her, two paper cups of something that smelled like peppermint and butter steaming between her mittened hands. She held one out. “Hot cocoa. Don’t argue, it’s Christmas Eve, arguing is against the rules.”
Mara took it because it was easier than not taking it, and because the cold had finally worked its way past her cardigan into her actual bones. “I’m not brooding.”
“You’re doing the face.”
“I don’t have a face.”
“You have several, and this is the sad one.” Della bumped her shoulder, gentle, the way she’d been doing since the two of them were nine years old and Della had decided, unilaterally and for no reason Mara had ever been able to determine, that they would be best friends for life. Twenty years later the verdict still held. “Is this about Chad?”
“It is not about Chad.” It was a little bit about Chad. Word had reached her three days ago, by way of her father, that Chad Ferris — her Chad, or the version of him that had once been hers, before he’d handed back a ring two Christmases prior with an apology so careful it had clearly been rehearsed — was coming back to Bethany for the holidays. With someone. A fiancée, this time, a real one, the kind that came with a save-the-date and an actual wedding rather than an indefinitely postponed one.
Mara had told herself this didn’t matter. She had told herself this several times, in fact, which was usually a good indication that it did.
“It is a little bit about Chad,” Della said, echoing her thought with the ease of someone who’d had two decades of practice reading Mara’s silences. “That’s fine. You’re allowed. But you are not, on my watch, going to spend Christmas Eve alone feeling sorry for yourself when you could be at my parents’ with a plate of my mother’s terrible ambrosia salad and a room full of people who actually like you.”
“I have plans.”
“You have a candle inventory and a rerun of a movie you’ve seen forty times.”
“It’s a good movie.”
“It is,” Della agreed, because she wasn’t wrong about anything, ever, which was both her most endearing and most exhausting quality. “But it’s not a plan. Come to my parents’. Ruthie will be there — your dad’s dropping her off on his way to the tree lot tomorrow morning anyway, might as well let her steal cookies from my mom’s kitchen tonight instead of yours.”
The mention of Ruthie softened something in Mara’s chest, the way it always did. Her cousin — ten years old, all elbows and opinions, technically Anne’s daughter and only unofficially Mara’s responsibility, in the loose, permanent way that happens in families where one adult travels for work and another happens to live four blocks from the school — had spent half her Saturdays this December “helping” at the shop, which mostly meant rearranging the candle displays by scent she liked best and eating the broken peppermint bark from the discount bin.
“I have to open tomorrow,” Mara said. “Christmas morning rush. People always forget stocking stuffers.”
“Tomorrow’s Christmas. Nobody’s forgetting stocking stuffers at nine a.m., they’re all still in pajamas.”
“Some people plan ahead.”
“Some people,” Della said, “are you, and you are currently standing in the cold turning down cocoa and company because it’s easier to be sad by yourself than happy around other people who might ask how you’re doing.” She said it lightly, the way you say a true thing you don’t want to make into a fight, and then she softened it further by looping her arm through Mara’s. “Come on. One hour. My mother will feed you until you cry, and then you can go home and watch your movie in peace, guilt-free, mission accomplished.”
Mara looked at the tree one more time, at the lopsided strand of colored lights, at the little clumps of people crossing the square in coats too thin for the weather, laughing about something she couldn’t hear. She thought, not for the first time this month, that there was a particular kind of loneliness that only showed up at Christmas — not the everyday kind, which she’d more or less made peace with, but the kind that arrived dressed in tinsel and expected you to be grateful for the company of your own reflection in a dark shop window.
“One hour,” she said.
Della’s face split into a grin. “One hour. I timed you at forty. Come on.”
• • •
Two hours and one plate of her mother’s ambrosia salad later — which Della had not oversold; it was, objectively, terrible, and Mara had eaten two helpings anyway out of loyalty — Mara walked home through the quiet streets with her hands in her coat pockets and her breath fogging in front of her.
Bethany at night in December had a particular hush to it, snow muffling everything except the occasional bark of a dog or the far-off sound of a car easing over the covered bridge on Route 9. Christmas lights framed every porch on Larkspur Street, blue and red and the warm amber ones her neighbor Mrs. Ottoline insisted were the only “proper” color, and Mara let herself enjoy it the way she always did when she wasn’t actively feeling sorry for herself — as something separate from her own life, a backdrop she got to walk through rather than a stage she was meant to be performing on.
Her apartment sat above the shop, accessible by a side stair that always stuck a little in cold weather, and she let herself in to the smell of the balsam candle she’d left burning in a dish by the window — bad practice, leaving a candle lit while she was out, and she felt the familiar prickle of guilt for it even as she blew it out and set the dish on the sill to cool.
The apartment was small and hers, in that order of importance. A tree in the corner, real, from her father’s lot, strung with lights and the mismatched ornaments of thirty years — a felt star Ruthie had made in first grade, a glass bulb that had been her mother’s, a wooden bird her grandmother Joan had loved enough to hang every single year without fail. Mara stood in front of it for a while in her coat, the way she sometimes did, not really looking at anything, just letting the quiet of the room settle over her like a second, heavier coat.
She thought about Chad, and about the ring he’d handed back with that rehearsed apology, and about how she had spent the better part of two years telling herself she wasn’t the kind of person who wanted, embarrassingly, foolishly, to be chosen. She thought about the last three dates she’d been talked into by well-meaning friends, and how each of them had ended with her walking home alone feeling slightly more foolish than the last, slightly more certain that whatever it was other people had — that unhesitating, uncomplicated belief that love was coming for them — was a thing she simply didn’t have the constitution for anymore.
“Okay,” she said, out loud, to no one, because the apartment was empty and talking to it didn’t count as strange if there was no one there to hear you do it. “Okay. Christmas Eve. Feel your feelings, Mara, and then go to bed, because you open at nine and Della’s right, nobody needs stocking stuffers before noon.”
She got ready for bed with the particular efficiency of someone who’d long since stopped waiting up for anything, brushed her teeth, turned off the tree lights, and paused, as she always did, at the window that looked down over the porch and the dark, snow-quiet square beyond it.
“Merry Christmas,” she said to the empty street, to the tree, to whatever version of herself might have believed, once, that this night was supposed to feel like magic. “Whatever that means this year.”
She did not, in that moment, expect an answer. She got into bed, pulled the quilt to her chin, and let the silence of Christmas Eve carry her under, entirely unaware that twelve hours later, on her porch, in the grey hush of Christmas morning, something impossible would be waiting for her, wrapped in silver paper and a ribbon she would spend the rest of the season trying to understand.
