At eight, they finally closed the farm to customers—hours past when they should have—and fell onto the couches in the great room. Miriam was past due to decide if she was going home with Tara, or staying here, and even more past due talking to Tara about it.

Charleston, electric with possibility, was ready and waiting. In the opposite direction, she had a half-empty inn full of ghosts she couldn’t exorcise and missing its most important resident. What magnet kept drawing her to say yes to Carrigan’s? Nostalgia? An opportunity to know her extended family? People who had always seen the real her—and liked that person?

Or, she thought, looking over at where Noelle had pushed up the sleeves of her hoodie and crossed her booted feet, was it simpler than that? Now that she knew that somewhere in the world, there was a handsome woman who gave her butterflies, who took her seriously and saw her, could she go back to her old life? She could hear Cass in her head, telling her that real things were always harder but that a real life was always better lived.

Before Miriam could get up the courage to pull Tara aside, Cole tromped down the stairs, declaring that there was absolutely no day like today to go Christmas caroling and see the town, and everyone was coming.

So Noelle, Miriam, Tara, and Hannah found themselves bundled up to their eyeballs against freezing gusts of wind, exhausted to the point of delirium, singing through their scarves to the residents of Advent. Along the way, they picked up Elijah, who left Jason at home with the twins, and put on a Christmas bow tie to join them. They knocked on doors hung with wreaths and mistletoe, on houses so covered in Christmas lights that Miriam wondered if you could see the tiny village from space.

Tara, who was good at everything she did—because she never did anything she wasn’t good at—sung beautifully. Cole sung enthusiastically and better than he had any right to, a result of a decade in an Episcopal choir. Hannah and Miriam made up lyrics to carols they knew only peripherally. Elijah could not sing on key at all, but he knew all the words, and he could project. Noelle hummed loudly.

They did not sound good, as a group.

It felt magical. Miriam was the most present she’d been, in the moment, in her body, in maybe all her life, and she wanted to keep that feeling. She wanted to stay here, in her little Christmasland next to this strange, tiny, festive town, with these people who brought her back to herself. It would be a huge risk, and it was impractical and illogical and maybe a terrible idea, and she wanted it.

This was where she belonged.