Hannah looked back over her shoulder at Miriam. The Business Boss mask that Miriam hadn’t known Hannah was wearing slipped, and her face fell for a moment into agony. Realizing she no longer knew how to read her cousin’s face pierced her. Miriam wanted to hold her but didn’t feel she had the right. All the bridges between them were either burned or long neglected and in terrible disrepair.

“Will you be okay finding your room?” Hannah asked. “I put you in the old Blue Rose room.”

Miriam nodded. “I need to go find the Matthewses, first.”

Aside from Cass, the Matthewses were the people who had loved Miriam the longest, and best, of anyone in her life. Mrs. Matthews was the cook at the inn, and Mr. Matthews handled general maintenance for all of Christmasland. Now in their sixties, they had been born in Advent and gotten jobs at Carrigan’s as teenagers. They’d fallen in love and stayed, caring for Miri and Hannah alongside their son Levi and their younger twins, Esther and Joshua.

Miriam’s parents hadn’t been parents but jailers. Hannah’s were documentary filmmakers who traveled the world, homeschooling her from far-flung locations until she convinced them, her sophomore year of high school, to let her live full-time at Carrigan’s. The Matthewses always had room for all of them.

Miriam found Mr. Matthews sitting on a tall stool at the kitchen island, drinking a cup of tea and watching his wife roll out cookie dough. The blue delft tile was the same as it had been all her life, a crack in one corner of the island where she’d dropped a heavy pot when she was twelve. Behind Mrs. Matthews was the pantry door where she’d marked Miriam’s height every holiday, and past that was the mudroom where Miriam and Hannah had taken off snow boots a thousand times.

When Mrs. Matthews looked up and saw Miriam, she dropped her rolling pin to the counter with a clatter, and Mr. Matthews turned around. In a moment, they had surrounded her in a hug.

She thought she would have to walk on tiptoes to avoid being decimated by memories of her father’s abuse, with tiny trauma landmines scattered about, still active after so many years. There hadn’t been any, yet, although she wasn’t letting her guard down. What she hadn’t expected was how much more deeply she could breathe here, seeing these beloved faces.

“Finally,” Mrs. Matthews said, putting her hands on Miriam’s cheeks and looking into her eyes. “You owe us a sit-down.” Miriam nodded solemnly. She owed them more than that.

“Soon. I promise. I’m not going anywhere,” she told them.

Part of her wished that were true, that she wasn’t leaving in a week, that she had all the time in the world here.

Footnotes

1 He was a Ukrainian baker.

2 This part was mostly true.