This was the first Christmas pageant Crie had been in in the five years she’d been at Miss Edward’s School for Girls. Every other year while the students made their costumes she’d made mumbled excuses. No one had ever tried to dissuade her. Instead she’d been given the job of running the lights for the show, having a head, as Madame Latour put it, for technical things. Things not alive, she’d meant. So each year Crie would watch the Christmas pageant alone in the dark at the back, as the beautiful, glowing, gifted girls had danced and sung the story of the Christmas miracle, basking in the light Crie provided.

But not this year.

She got into her costume and looked at herself in the mirror. A huge chiffon snowflake looked back. Really, she had to admit, more of a snowdrift than a single flake, but still, it was a costume and it was quite splendid. The other girls’ mothers had helped them, but Crie had done her own. To surprise Mommy, she’d told herself, trying to drown out the other voice.

If she looked closely she could see the tiny droplets of blood where her pudgy, indelicate fingers had fumbled the needle and speared herself. But she’d persevered until she finally had this costume. And then she’d had her brainwave. Really, the most brilliant thought in her entire fourteen years.

Her mother, she knew, revered light. It was, she’d been told all her life, what we all strive for. That’s why it’s called enlightenment. Why smart people are described as bright. Why thin people succeed. Because they’re lighter than others.

It was all so obvious.

And now Crie would actually be playing a snowflake. The whitest, lightest of elements. And her own bit of brilliance? She’d gone to the dollar store and with her allowance bought a bottle of glitter. She’d even managed to walk straight past the chocolate bars, stale and staring. Crie had been on a diet for a month now and soon she was sure her mother would notice.

She’d applied glue and glitter and now she looked at the results.

For the first time in her life Crie knew she was beautiful. And she knew, in just a few short minutes, her mother would think so too.

Clara Morrow stared through the frosted mullions of her living-room window at the tiny village of Three Pines. She leaned forward and shaved some frost from the window. Now that we have some money, she thought, we should replace the old windows. But while Clara knew that was the sensible thing to do, most of her decisions weren’t really sensible. But they suited her life. And now, watching the snow globe that was Three Pines, she knew she liked looking at it through the beautiful designs the frost made on the old glass.