At this, there was a sharp intake of breath from all of them.

“I’ll miss my bassoon lesson,” said Pippa worriedly.

“I wanted a snowball fight,” said Jack.

“Closing the school,” said Phoebe in the dreamy voice of one upon whom unimaginable riches have been bestowed.

“Well, we’ll see,” said Carmen hurriedly. “Now, back to bed.”

But nobody was remotely capable of going back to bed: Phoebe protested that she was too scared to go by herself and would have to sleep in Carmen’s bed, Jack said if they went to bed he was just going to go out by himself, and Pippa sniffed and tutted like an old woman on the bus.

Carmen, so unused to her nieces and nephew, for once hit on the right solution: making everyone hot chocolate—the range was still warm, and they huddled around it as she ransacked the cupboard for something that might pass as hot and a treat.

She finally found an untouched bag of very posh hot chocolate in a Valvona and Crolla basket, which must have arrived as a client gift. Carmen looked at the children and they looked back at her wonderingly, as if, on this nighttime trip of marvels, they couldn’t possibly be realizing their wildest dreams. Carmen figured out how to put on the cooktop and whisked up the frothy, milky foam—it was dark chocolate, durr, the worst kind, so she added plenty of sugar to make it palatable—and filled up their little stripy mugs with their names painted on them, and they sat around the table, talking about their plans for their snow day: The biggest snowman! Getting the neighbors in a snowball fight! Tobogganing!

And then, well, there was an entire Christmas basket right there, and it wasn’t fair not to let them try the crystallized ginger—“yum,” according to the girls; “disgusting,” according to Jack—and have one of the little hand-wrapped chocolates and smell the tea and, okay then, just a Florentine, until their little feast was finished, and little heads began to droop, and Carmen shooed them upstairs together, making Pippa promise to supervise extra toothbrushing, and only the dirty cups in the dishwasher later that morning betrayed the little gang had been there at all—that and the unexpected kiss from Phoebe that was so fleeting Carmen wasn’t sure if it too had been a dream.

Chapter Nineteen

“What the hell is THUNDERSNOW?”

Carmen squinted at her phone and the text message from a number she didn’t recognize. She frowned. “Who this?”

“It’s Blair. Blair Pfenning. Blair who took you out to lunch? That Blair? You know? Yesterday?”

Carmen found her heart jumping. Goodness. Well, this was a surprise. She had trained herself not to expect it. And also, he was a knob. But . . .