It’s plainly written on the schedule, in a size-twelve serif font, black ink, neatly laminated. Christmas Eve eve is the day the Kim-Prescotts pile into two cars to drive up the dangerous, snow-covered roads to spend an entire day at the Timberline Lodge ski area. There is truly nothing I would rather do less than this family ski trip.

This core belief is verified when I walk into the kitchen at six in the morning after no sleep and find the entire family is not only awake but energized. Meemaw’s got her snowboard over her shoulder, Lovey is doing quad stretches, and Dylan and Andrew are poring over a map of the Timberline runs as if everything between them is perfectly normal. The assholes don’t even seem hungover. Jack is dressed in her ski clothes, making breakfast sandwiches that she wraps in parchment paper. She refuses to look at me when I enter the room.

Palpable shame rolls up and down my limbs. I kissed her. I let her kiss me. And when she asked me if I was still going to marry her brother, I said nothing.

I’m too tired to spend a day at Timberline trying to avoid Jack and my guilt. Plus, I haven’t got the faintest idea how to ski. I’m about to tell everyone I’m too sick to go when Jack looks up from behind the stove. “Where’s Dad? Am I making him a sandwich?”

Katherine, who is packing up her own gear on the kitchen island, pauses. “Your father isn’t joining us today,” she says with passable indifference. I wonder if that’s where Jack learned it. “He’ll be here when we get home. He said he’s going to make us meatloaf for dinner.”

The house goes silent. And shit. I can’t bail on today, not when Alan is disappointing Katherine yet again. These traditions mean the whole world to her.

Mom-guilt, of course, is the reason I end up in a borrowed snowsuit, smooshed between the grandmas in the backseat of the Lincoln Navigator, eating my breakfast sandwich. Timberline Lodge is an actual ski chalet—a beautiful mountain lodge amidst snowcapped peaks, pretty enough to make you forget it was used in the exterior shots of The Shining. For a moment, the sight of the sweeping white landscape makes me forget all my own shit, too.

My own shit comes back to me tenfold when we get out of the car.

“Andrew and I are going to partner up, since we both snowboard,” Dylan announces as we all stand in a semicircle in the parking lot. Andrew looks slightly perplexed by this declaration and by Dylan’s sudden authority over family ski day. “We’re going to take the Magic Mile up and start at Coffel’s run. And Katherine, you and the grandmas are probably planning to stick around Molly’s, right?”