I’ve invited my closest friends to join us for Christmas Eve dinner. I have three tight friends, Kristine, Nic, and Anne, and I know their kids and husbands as if we’re all an extended family. And maybe we are. Kristine doesn’t have family in state. Nic has only her mom, who lives in Portland, a four-hour drive away. Anne has parents locally, but they’re a lot like mine (my mom and dad live in Spokane, comfortably distanced by the hulking Cascade Mountains), which means they’re always traveling, busy doing what retirees with AARP cards do.

It’s a treat for me to have everyone over, and I might not be able to get a tree in a stand, but I can host a party that puts Martha Stewart to shame. This is a Whiting skill, Whiting being my maiden name. The women in my family can cook and set a table and create an atmosphere that makes people just want to pull up a chair and stay.

Tonight’s menu comes from an old issue of Gourmet magazine—ham, turkey, roasted chestnut stuffing, smooth brown gravy with a hint of champagne, mashed potatoes, glazed sweet potatoes, homemade rolls, cranberry salad, pomegranate-and-avocado-laced spinach salad—sublime. This is my traditional Christmas Eve feast, and everything is as it’s always been. Except for Daniel missing.

And just thinking, remembering, I feel my insides do another free fall, one of those maneuvers that takes my breath away and leaves me shaken, filled with too much adrenaline.

I miss my life. I miss the family we had more than I can say.

But Daniel and I aren’t married anymore, and I can’t go back, can only go forward. So I put him out of my mind, knowing he’s with Melinda tonight. He’s fine. I’m fine. Everybody’s fine. Besides, I don’t have time to feel sad. I’ve got seventeen people arriving in minutes, eight of them kids, plus some visiting relatives my friends couldn’t leave home, seeing as they’d flown into Seattle for the holidays.

Showered but not completely dressed, I run around the house lighting all the candles, then dim the lights, put a match to the Duraflame log in the living room (Duraflames are a gift to the single woman), turn on the CD player already loaded with carols, and we’re almost ready. I just have to finish my makeup, button the back of my blouse, and get shoes on.

Upstairs again, I’m throwing makeup on my face as if this is a game of paintball—beige splat; gold splat; gray splat; red splat. Thank God I know my face pretty well now. I can point and shoot, and the makeup hits the target with ninety percent accuracy.

I’m just spritzing perfume when the doorbell rings. They’re here.

Anne, her surgeon husband, Philip, and her brood of three are the first to arrive.