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“Don’t.” I got the sleeve. “I’m not leaving. I want you to notice that I’m not leaving, because eight years of practice says I should be halfway to my car by now.”

Behind us, the street went very quiet.

The high schoolers suddenly found urgent business with a wreath that was already hanging. Colette turned her back to us and recruited a volunteer to help fold a tarp that one person could have handled. Pearl stood at the beverage station with a paper cup in each hand and watched me walk up the sidewalk. She didn’t say a word. In eight years, I could count Pearl’s silences on one hand.

She held out a cup. I took it. It was cocoa and it had a candy cane in it, because Pearl puts a candy cane in it when she has decided you are having a bad night and she is not going to discuss it. “I’ve got a walk-in that works,” she said to the middle distance.

“I know.”

“I’m just saying, I’ve got a walk-in that works, and a man in San Francisco who liked my croissants, and a friend who looks like that.” She wiped the counter of the folding table. “That’s not a position. That’s just the three things I’ve got.”

I walked up the middle of Main Street toward the parking lot with one hand in my pocket and the cocoa going cold in the other. Behind me the lights we’d spent all afternoon hanging came on in sequence, north to south, because Frank had reset every timer that morning and Frank does not run late.

CHAPTER 13

NORA

Eight days after the Calloways canceled, Frank raised his hand before Griffin reached the last page of the vendor report, and half the committee braced like they’d heard a beam crack. “One question.” Frank stood, arms crossed over thirty years of professional suspicion. “These replacement vendors. What did you promise them?”

“We offered two fee waivers, contingent on this committee approving them,” Griffin said. “Together. Nora gave the Salem barbecue truck the booth closest to the stage, and I gave the second food truck the loading space behind the corner unit.”

“That space fits one delivery van.”

“It also fits one food truck if nobody opens the passenger door.”

Laughter broke out across the community center. Frank looked almost as surprised as everyone else. Even Ivy glanced up from the schedule she’d been annotating, and Ivy didn’t look up for anything short of a fire.

Jenna, my holiday clerk, had opened Winters Wonderland at nine while I sat at the front table with my hands wrapped around a paper cup of Pearl’s cocoa. I let the numbers say what I hadn’t dared to say myself. Over the past eight days, we had replaced ninety-seven percent of the Calloways’ food service with signed vendor agreements contingent on today’s vote. I’d insisted on paper, and Griffin had driven to Salem himself to collect the signatures. A week earlier, I thought losing the Calloways would end the festival. Now we were short one breakfast shift.

Frank wasn’t finished. He never was. “One more thing. I heard a rumor at the lumber yard. The Meridian Group’s telling anyone who’ll hold still that you’re overextended. That this whole project’s about to fold underneath you.”

Forty people stopped moving and leaned closer.

“Meridian’s had a position in this block since September,” Griffin said. “Victor Crane wanted a partner to co-develop blocks like this one and flip them. I told him no in October, and he’s been waiting for January fifteenth ever since. That sound you hear is Victor Crane encountering a word nobody usually gives him.” He set the report down. “The money in those buildings is mine. So are the mistakes. You’ve watched me make a few.”

“Watched you fix a few, too.” Frank dropped his arms. “You rebuilt my father’s stage the way he built it when gutting it would’ve been cheaper. I’ve spent thirty years hearing developers tell me old work isn’t worth the trouble.” He sat down. “You took the trouble.”

Nobody applauded. Mrs. Morrison patted Griffin’s shoulder on her way to the cocoa urn, and the agenda moved on to garland. In Holly Creek, that counted as a standing ovation.

Owen called the vote at nine forty. The recovery plan passed without a single no. Owen checked the tally twice, then failed to hide a smile. “Full council, tomorrow, nine a.m. Both co-chairs. We present the budget and the vendor roster, the council blesses it, and we open in nineteen days with full food service and a stage that won’t drop the children’s choir into the cellar.” He peered at us over his glasses. “Go have a boring evening. You’ve earned one.”

Down the hall, that same choir was rehearsing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” with more volume than pitch, and the whole building smelled of pine garland and fresh cocoa, with construction-paper garland taped across the windows.

Pearl found me at the coat rack with two candy canes in her apron pocket and an expression I trusted less than black ice. “Look at you. Hope. Right on your face, where people can see it.”

“It’s the cocoa.”

“It’s the developer.” She hooked a candy cane into my coat pocket like a boutonniere. “Eight years I’ve watched you brace for the worst so it couldn’t surprise you. I like you better standing up straight.”

I didn’t argue, which for me amounted to a confession. The truth was, I’d always handled hope the way I handled Christmas inventory, ordered in small quantities, because overstock could ruin you. That morning, with the contracts signed and Frank thawing and Griffin laughing at his own bad joke, I went ahead and ordered big.

We took over the community center’s main room at six that evening to build the council presentation. The garland crew worked down the staircase railing with wire and a long rope of pine, and Owen sat at the corner desk checking budget lines. Griffin handled the financial pages. I handled the schedule. Cold coffee and colored tabs filled the space between us.

He went for refills at seven. I reached across his side of the table for the venue folder and found a notebook underneath it, a fat, soft-cornered thing, bound with a rubber band, fallen open where the band had slipped.

I shouldn’t have looked. I looked.

Hand-drawn festival plans filled the spread, penciled and re-penciled. Lantern arches curved over Main Street with the wiring worked out in the margins. The sleigh route looped the square, every turn flagged with a tiny horse head. The stage stood in one corner with every notch in Frank’s father’s joinery labeled. Front and center, drawn pane by pane, was my shop. He’d drawn Winters Wonderland’s display window with the ornament tree where I always put it. Eraser marks surrounded the tree because he had redrawn it until it sat in the right place.