The incredulity in her voice feels like a knife between my ribs. I gasp, like a wounded creature dying out in the wildness, and then I clamp my jaw shut and hope none of them heard me.

Of course, I’m not quite that lucky.

Paul Hollywood launches himself into a patio chair and begins barking frantically in my direction. I duck behind a covered grill, hold my breath, and wait until the barking stops.

Then I wait even longer, until the silence stretches for several minutes, and I’m certain they’ve all gone back inside for dinner. I wonder what would happen if I never went back inside, if I climbed down this balcony and disappeared into the night. Would Andrew come after me? Or would he just find someone else to help him get his inheritance?

It doesn’t matter, because I have no way back to the city. We’re up on a mountain, and as far as I can tell, there’s not another house for miles. I’m completely and utterly stuck. I carefully climb out from behind the grill and brace myself to face the family.

“Hey, there,” says a loud, husky voice in the night.

Jack is still outside, Paul Hollywood obediently sitting at her feet. She’s moved to the end of her balcony, and I’m at the end of mine, so we’re only fifteen feet apart now, separated by a gap of air and snow. “Are you okay?” she asks, just like she did that day in Powell’s.

“Oh, fine,” I say, dusting the snow off the back of my jeans. “I, um… couldn’t find the bathroom?”

“Incidentally, it’s not outside,” she says with a half-moon smile I can barely make out in the dark. “What are you doing here?”

“Well,” I try, “I was looking for the bathroom, as you know, and then I ended up outside, and then I heard Dylan asking if I was a dying pregnant Canadian, and I thought it might be best to pretend like I couldn’t overhear it, so I hid behind this grill, and—”

“No, Ellie,” Jack says. “What are you doing here? At my family’s cabin? With my brother?”

I take a sharp breath. “He’s my… fiancé.”

“Elle,” she says, and that one syllable rips through me like shrapnel. That name. My name. The name she called me that entire day. The name she called me when we were tangled in each other’s arms. “I haven’t seen or heard from you in a year, and then you show up for Christmas engaged to my brother?”

I turn away from her and stare at the Airstream nestled in the field of snow. “I thought you didn’t recognize me.”

“What?”

“In there. You acted like you didn’t know me. I thought maybe you forgot.”