Saturday the weather turned unseasonably mild. Shoppers rushed out to shop while they knew they wouldn’t get wet or slip on ice. The day passed in a blur of mermaids, pirates, Legos, ferries, rope bracelets, screaming children, hyperactive seven-year-olds, and a pretty little five-year-old who pulled the marble container over so that all the marbles rolled across the floor. Wink earned her salary that day. Quick as a, well, a wink, the girl dropped to her knees and gathered up the wayward marbles. After that, whenever a child came in, Wink sweetly showed the child a mermaid doll or a ferry, allowing the mother the freedom to concentrate on shopping.

At the end of the day, Christina said to Wink, “Choose anything you want from this shop. You deserve it!”

A small voice in the back of her mind warned her: Don’t let yourself get too close to this little girl. She’s not yours.

After Wink left, Christina shut and locked the door and turned the OPEN sign to CLOSED.

Then she slid right down onto the floor, rested her arms on her knees and her head on her arms.

She’d been trapped in this sort of bleak emotional cloud before over the past year so she knew she had to wait till it passed. She had to allow her Inner Christina to berate her for all her choices. All her friends were married, with children, or married with children on the way, and here she was, a thirty-year-old spinster. Okay, no one used that word anymore, but it sounded more demeaning than single and she was in the kind of mood a friend told her about: Sometimes you’re so depressed you’ll do anything to make yourself feel worse. She had always wanted to marry and have children and it broke her heart to know that she hadn’t given her parents grandchildren before they died. But a person didn’t get married just to have children, did she?

She lightly hit the back of her head against the door. Christmas. Such an emotional time. It was a joy for her to see children’s faces light up when they spotted the perfect toy, and that joy filled her heart. But it was difficult then to return home to an empty house—okay, she had Mittens, but giving her a new catnip mouse for Christmas wasn’t the same as being with a family.

Now she’d met Wink. And Andy. Was she falling in love with him? Of course not! He was a Bittlesman who dated models. He’d probably return to New York after Christmas and marry Anastasiya Belousova, and in a few years he and his wife would swan into Christina’s small shed of a store with their many perfect children…

Okay! her Inner Christina announced. Enough!