Yet here she is, singing anyway. So when she reaches the line, I join in with “kiss her once for me.” Our voices blend together not unlike the way Andrew’s and Dylan’s did, except where theirs were molasses, ours are peanut brittle. Inside a garbage disposal.

As we attempt to harmonize, we’re both smiling through the words, half laughing at ourselves for how awful we sound. Jack looks up at me, and she’s looking at me like she did that day. Like I’m a person who takes up space in this world.

It never meant anything.

You invented the whole thing in your head.

Two hundred thousand dollars.

But she’s singing this song for me, and I’m literally goo inside a skinsuit. I feel drunker than I am—so drunk, I might do something stupid.

I might float away.

I might touch her hair.

I might kiss her, once, for me. Just once, to remember what it felt like.

The song ends, and I have to turn away from the heat of Jack’s stare. I press my fingers to the hollows of my cheeks and feel the blush radiating off my skin.

“Gingerbread houses!” Meemaw shouts over the family’s raucous applause. “We should make gingerbread houses!”

“Barbara.” Katherine clicks her tongue. “It’s nine o’clock at night.”

But everyone is some combination of drunk and/or high, so Meemaw’s demand that we host the gingerbread house contest right now is treated with a startling degree of seriousness.

“Jack. Do you have the supplies?” Dylan asks with the same intensity they brought to the snowball fight. Except, now they’re lying flat on their back on a rug, swinging their glass of eggnog as they hum “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.”

“Yeah, they’re out in the Airstream,” she says, “but it’s getting late, and I think we should maybe wind down, not increase our sugar intake.”

“Don’t be a party pooper, Jacqueline,” Meemaw says. “Go get the goods! I’ll clear the puzzle from the dining room table!”

Jack looks both annoyed and amused by her family’s antics, but she throws up her hands and says, “Fine! Dylan, help me carry.”

“Dylan is not able to walk that far,” Dylan answers from the rug.

“Never mind.” Jack backpedals. “Andrew, come help—”

“I’m not going outside,” Andrew snaps. “It’s cold. Make Ellie do it.”

“You’re going to make your fiancée go outside in the cold because you don’t want to?” I ask, hoping Andrew will realize the bad optics of the situation and change his mind.