It was two days before Christmas, and after a morning so busy (Nory hadn’t even had time to lament the selling of a vintage edition of Shirley Hughes’s Alfie Stories), Serendipitous Seconds was quiet. Most of the offices in the surrounding area had closed at lunchtime and wouldn’t be open again until January 4. The last of the online sales had been express delivered yesterday morning, and now it was time to take stock and batten down the hatches before they closed for the holidays.

“Should we take the decorations down now? So we don’t have to come back to it in January?” Andrew asked.

“No,” said Nory, looking lovingly around her shop. She loved her shop all year round, but never so well as when the days were dark and every shelf glittered with frosted leaves, red glitter berries, and fairy lights. “Let’s leave them up. Let’s keep the magic going for a little longer.”

Nory remembered when she was a child and her dad would bring her and Thomas up to London on one of the dead days between Christmas and New Year’s to look at the shop window displays. It had felt magical, like the Christmas picture books she read. For those hours in the quiet city with the sparkling windows, it had felt like she was living inside one of her books. Now, she liked to think of someone else’s child out for a cold afternoon walk, stumbling across her little shop with the jolly Father Christmas in the window and the twinkling lights within.

“Did the nanas decide who would be cooking the turkey yet?” she asked Andrew.

“Seb is going to do it. It all got rather out of control, and we very nearly had another trifle incident on our hands.”

Nory winced.

“Seb’s printed off a spreadsheet and given each of them specific jobs. Nina and Glenda may each shine in their own right.”

“Who gets to cook the roast potatoes, though? Roast potatoes can be a contentious issue.”

“Yes, so it would seem. I will therefore be doing the roast potatoes.” Andrew pulled his phone out of his pocket and scrolled down the screen. “Yes, here we are. Nina is on roast parsnips. Glenda is on glazed carrots and minted peas; now she gets two vegetables because I am reliably informed—by Glenda herself—that roast parsnips counts as two vegetables in terms of importance.”

“It’s like vegetable Top Trumps!”

“It is exactly like that. Glenda gets to do braised red cabbage in spiced red wine, while Nina will be making panfried Brussels sprouts with chestnuts and crispy bacon lardons.”

“Wait, doesn’t that count as three things?”

“You would think, but no. The braised cabbage in red wine is apparently a higher skill level than the panfried sprouts and therefore it’s allowed.”

“Who’s doing the gravy? That’s surely a pistols-at-dawn situation.”