After two weeks of this, her head was too full of the farm, and her ideas, and her feelings, so she ducked into the kitchen to call Cole.

“Babe,” she said, “I have terrible news. I need you to help me process some emotions.”

“Gross! We don’t have those.” Cole laughed. “Hit me, I’ll see if I can remember how feelings work.”

“Everything here is so much. All these people who’ve known me all my life, who loved Cass, all these memories, all these regrets. Even the wallpaper feels like it’s heavy with memories. I feel like I’m being rubbed raw.”

“And it makes you want to come home to hide again?” Cole guessed.

“No, that’s the part I don’t understand. It makes me want to stay.” Miriam sighed, laying her head down on the kitchen counter, the phone wedged under her. “I have this carefully constructed life in Charleston, I have my shop, I have you and Tara. I never have to deal with anything that hurts or is hard. Why would I want to abandon that to try to save a dying business, alongside a cousin I barely know anymore and a woman who kind of hates me? Please explain to me why my heart keeps whispering to me to stay.”

Cole hummed, and she strained to hear him over the street noises from wherever he was. “You’ve been successfully running from this most of the time I’ve known you. Now that these feelings are coming up, they’re probably going to keep surfacing until you work through them. Cass and Carrigan’s were the center of your life in a lot of ways, and then they suddenly weren’t, and you never processed that loss. You’ll have to do that, even if you’re in Charleston. But you could do it at Christmasland! I don’t really want you to move to New York, but I don’t want you to miss a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. Follow your heart!”

“What if my heart is making unreasonable and irrational demands?” Miriam whispered.

“It’s probably about time it did. Okay, I love you more than life, but I was actually on a date who I’ve now abandoned inside a bar, so I have to go.”

“Cole!” Miriam chided, horrified. “You didn’t have to take this call while you were on a date!”

“Eh. It wasn’t going well anyway. Speaking of dates. Have you talked to Tara about any of this?” As protective as he was of Miriam, he and Tara went all the way back to birth, and he looked out for her in his way.