“Okay, show me what to do.”

He gathers some fresh snow in his hands and starts compacting it into a ball. When the globe is big enough, he starts rolling it on the ground, making it bigger and bigger. I imitate him and come up with a decent-sized, if not as perfectly round, sphere. Diego adjusts the misshapen bits, and then puts my ball on top of his.

“I’ll make the head,” he says. “Can you find some twigs for the arms and something to make the eyes and the mouth?”

I move into the wood shack to scavenge the twigs, collect two small pinecones for the eyes, and strip a curvy line of bark off a log to use for the mouth.

“Perfect,” Diego says, assessing the final result. “We just need a carrot for the nose.”

“I’ll go ask Mom for one.”

I jog back to the house, and I’m about to enter the kitchen when I overhear my mom and sister talking, so I stop just behind the open door.

“They look cute,” Mom says.

“They look weird,” Julia hisses.

“What do you mean, ‘weird?’”

“Come on, he’s not her type at all. No stable job, probably no education, dark hair… Nikki prefers blonds.”

Mostly true, but how dare she?

“Oh, honey… love is blind,” my mom sighs. “You can’t control who you fall for.”

“Love, sure,” Julia snaps.

“What do you have against Diego?”

“Nothing, he’s absolutely fine. But doesn’t it seem strange to you that out of the blue”—she snaps her fingers—“Nikki suddenly has a boyfriend no one has ever seen or heard of, and suddenly she’s bringing the guy home for Christmas?”

“What are you suggesting?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t want to be the single older sister for yet another year, and she asked a friend to do her a favor. I mean, it must be hard for her with me getting married before her…”

It takes all of my willpower not to go in there and strangle Julia on the spot. I don’t need anyone’s pity, and especially not hers, thank you very much. And what she’s saying stings even more—not only because it’s true that Diego is not my boyfriend, but more so because he isn’t even a friend. He’s just a guy I’m paying five thousand dollars to pretend he likes me.

“Don’t be silly, Jules,” my mom says. “They’re not friends. Have you seen the way he looks at her?”

What? How does he look at me?

“No,” Julia says, echoing my thoughts. “Does he have a special look?”

“Yes, he stares at your sister the way your father used to look at me when we were young.”

“Mom, that’s absurd.” Unfortunately, I agree with my sister here. “And Dad still looks at you that way.”

“True.” Mom giggles. “And trust me, love, I can tell when a young man is in love.”

“Mom, I think you want to see Nikki married off so much that you’ve put your pink glasses on and are ready to swallow whatever bullshit she feeds you.”