“I guess you’re staying until Thanksgiving.” Hannah laid her head back, staring at the ceiling for a moment before looking over at Miriam. “As for you moving here to fulfill some sort of prophecy of Cass’s…let’s make sure there’s somewhere to move to, first.”

“Speaking of Cass’s prophecy, where’s Blue?” Miriam asked.

Miriam had done a better job keeping up with Levi Matthews than she had with anyone else from Carrigan’s. The three of them had grown up running together, an inseparable trio. Hannah and Miriam had started calling him Blue when they were little, since he shared a name with the world’s most famous blue jeans, and it had stuck. He was irascible, difficult, mischievous, and obsessed with cooking from the time he could walk. He’d gone to Le Cordon Bleu and had grand plans to transform the inn into a culinary destination. He was, in many ways, a hometown legend around Advent.

Then he’d run off on a cruise ship to be a chef.

The beautiful, angry boy who left.

“I mean I know where he’s been, we talk,” Miriam clarified, “but…why wasn’t he home for the funeral?”

Hannah stiffened beside her. “I told him never to come home,” she said quietly.

Miriam reeled back. What? She’d clearly missed something crucial. When she’d left, Levi and Hannah were best friends, pieces of a whole who fought as much as they talked but who always circled back to each other. She knew, from her calls with Levi, that something had caused an estrangement, but she couldn’t imagine Hannah ever telling Levi to leave Carrigan’s and not come home. How had his parents felt?!

“We were engaged,” Hannah continued, picking at an invisible thread on her blouse, “more in love than I thought was humanly possible. When we broke up, it didn’t go well. It’s my fault he’s not here.”

What the hell?

Miriam’s entire world had just blown open. Her eternal compasses had not only fallen in love, but also had a catastrophic breakup, and no one had told her. They’d planned to get married, and no one had asked her to be in the wedding. She talked to Levi at least once a month. He told her about life on a ship, seeing the world.

He had not told her he was in love with her cousin. What the hell?

“How?” was all she could say.

“The first year you didn’t come for Christmas, it was just the two of us, and we ended up under the mistletoe.” Hannah shrugged, as if she were merely reciting facts, but a tear leaked down her cheek. “That was it.”

Miriam frantically did the math. She left ten years ago, and Levi four years ago. So they’d dated for six entire years, and no one ever mentioned it? How was that possible?