Their first stop was an antique shop. Noelle wanted to give Miriam a chance to play and show her that Noelle took her work seriously. The owner was overjoyed to see Miriam. “I’ve been following you on Instagram. I love that mirror piece you posted last month. Come on, I’ll make you a cup of coffee while you warm up, and then I’ll show you some junk I think you’ll like.”

They followed the woman into the back of the shop, past a wall of porcelain heads filled with plastic flowers, and plastic Christmas decorations from the sixties. This was definitely Miriam’s kind of place.

“You brought me to an antique shop?” Miriam whispered to Noelle. “I’m going to get distracted by stuff and not pay any attention to you!”

“I know,” Noelle said. “I’m going to watch you do it, and it’s going to make my whole day. Nothing’s cuter than you getting excited about art.”

Miriam made that noise in her throat that Noelle was already learning meant she was about to get kissed, but the shop owner interrupted.

“Now, I think you’ll love this badly taxidermized mongoose.”

They left the shop with the back of the pickup full of various merchandise and a ton of shots of Miriam holding the pieces up for the Bloomers. Miriam and Noelle walked, hand in hand, down Main Street, visiting the diner and the boutique. Collin made them latte art and blushed when Miriam asked him about Marisol.

They also stopped by a tiny library in a converted old house. The librarian had worked at Carrigan’s as a teen, before going away to college and coming back with her master’s, determined to convince the town council to fund a library. She was excited to see Miriam back home, and Miriam was excited to have a place for new books. When warm vanilla smells wafted out onto the snow from a bakery and ice cream shop, Miriam dragged them inside to eat specialty homemade ice cream, in spite of Noelle’s protestations that it was, in fact, below freezing outside. (“It’s my birthday, I get ice cream,” she argued.) The baker picked Miriam’s brain about some of Rosenstein’s vintage recipes that they’d retired. They talked for so long about local distributors of artisanal butter that Noelle ate all of Miriam’s ice cream, and they had to order a second round.

Noelle loved watching Miriam connect with all the people in Advent, who were a part of her own daily life. It made this feel more real, more concrete, that Miriam was here to stay. And she found that kissing the ice cream out of Miriam’s mouth warmed her up quickly, even as snowflakes began to fall around them.

As they started to make the drive back, the snow started coming down harder.