During the weekend cake-making fest, Mom started talking about “baking the boosh” with grandchildren soon, and Sophie nearly spit out the icing she’d been tasting. The men of Pinebury, Connecticut were going to have to seriously up their game before she got anywhere close to having children.

And she doubted her four brothers, all older than she, got the grandchildren comments from Mom, even though they were always popping in and out of Mom and Dad’s house for something. Like dinner.

But her mother’s half-joking comment had stuck with Sophie into her workweek, and for the first time since finishing her degrees and starting teaching, she almost wished settling down and having a family of her own didn’t seem quite so far off or unrealistic.

Maybe it was her Greek roots—something genetically ingrained in her to crave a big, raucous, affectionate, opinionated family. Her grandparents on both sides had left a lot of their Greekness at the border when they immigrated to the United States, but the family had held on to tons of traditional recipes, a few bizarre superstitions, and unusual first names that had plagued both sisters since childhood. Her brothers got lucky. Alec, Seth, Jason, and Hector. Well, maybe Hector wasn’t so lucky. Poor Xanthe. She had the worst of it. No one ever knew to pronounce the e at the end, like in Persephone.

At school, everyone just called Sophie Mademoiselle, including most of the other faculty. Sophronia earned her strange looks, and Ms. Iraklidis rolled off the tongue about as easily as cold peanut butter.

Humming “Jingle Bell Rock”—which had been stuck in her head since the weekend—Sophie gave the desks a squirt with the cleaning spray she kept on hand and wiped them down before sweeping the floor of her classroom. Janitor Charlie already had enough work cleaning up after the students without her adding chocolaty fingerprints and powdered sugar to it.

When the kids decorated cakes, it was…an event. They’d had two Yule logs per class and free artistic license. Eating them was somehow even messier. But the Bûches de Noël had looked so pretty with the dark-chocolate shavings, red-and-green gumdrops, and little sugar-dusted marzipan pinecones. Sophie had taken pictures throughout the day and would add them to her Album de l’année, a scrapbook she made every year and kept in her classroom. She had six lined up now and planned on adding a career’s-worth of them.