Mia had been very comforting when it went down.

She’d held me as we sat on the bed in my room and told me I was doing the right thing by “setting him free.” That I shouldn’t return any of his texts or calls while I was away. “To give you both time to heal.”

What bullshit.

A movement out the window over the inn’s kitchen sink drew my attention and I looked up to see the back door to the inn’s patio swing open.

Out stepped Arthur’s aunt Esha followed by my grandma Jo, talking as they strolled around the courtyard’s wrought iron tables and chairs.

Their conversation seemed to be going well if the smile on my grandma’s face was any indication. And at least Arthur’s aunt wasn’t raging at my grandmother like her nephew had raged at me. She seemed far nicer. Somewhere in her forties, with short dark hair, her angular face made it clear Arthur inherited a lot of his looks from the Chakrabarti side of the family.

I wasn’t a fashionista by any stretch, but I was pretty sure that was the classic Burberry pattern on the scarf tucked inside the flipped-up collar of her cashmere trench coat. She carried herself with a sense of propriety and reserve that tipped you off that she’d been raised elsewhere, even before her English accent gave her away. But she had faint lines around the corners of her dark brown eyes that deepened easily when she smiled, which I got the impression she did often.

However, it was my grandma’s expression that caught me. Grandma Jo hadn’t looked like that, bright-eyed and happy, in a long time and I didn’t realize it until that moment. The last few years she’d seemed to carry an unspoken, invisible weight around. I wondered at the reason, though I doubted I’d ever find out. Again, as good as my family was about loving each other, we were equally good about avoiding the truly hard conversations.

I had a sneaking suspicion I was going to have plenty of those in the days ahead, which was going to make this Christmas break especially interesting.

Three

Okay, so, more about Christmas. Not the holiday, everyone knows about that.

About the town. My town.

Which wasn’t always called Christmas. When it was formed, after the Land Run in 1893, it was christened Springfield and left alone for the century-plus that followed.

Until 2004, when Ralph Tater-Hall came up with a master plan to set our town apart by changing its name to something related to the world’s most popular holiday and then promoting the crap out of it to bring in tourists. And revenue. Good ol’ Ralph was the mayor at the time and folks liked him enough to go along with the idea, so the name change became official in 2005.