“Oh, sorry. I know you don’t like the music.”

A pause. Then:

“Go ahead. I don’t mind so much anymore.”

“Really?”

“It’s growing on me.”

And you’re growing on me. As she turned on the radio and switched the dial to her favorite Christmas station, she kept that particular opinion to herself. It wouldn’t make a difference anyway. She was going to show him the meaning of Christmas (somehow, and apparently with Michael’s help), he was going to give them the company back, and then he’d be gone. Back to Dallas where he belonged. This would be nothing more than a memory. A cocktail party joke he could tell about that time he almost kissed a poor, provincial, Christmas-obsessed girl in Miller’s Point.

But at least she’d have the festival, right? That had to matter more than anything, including this crush she’d fallen headlong into.

The problem with breaking the crush completely was that as they drove deeper and deeper into the darkness, Clark started tapping the steering wheel and humming off-key with her favorite song. I’ll Be Home for Christmas. It was so sweet, so unexpected, she almost cried. And if she hadn’t been careful, she definitely would have fallen in love with him right then and there.

“Well.”

Upon their arrival, they found no bonfire, no Santa, and certainly no snow. They didn’t even find a single other human being. Only a large, dark, grassy field.

“Are you sure we went to the right place?”

“Yeah. This is where the GPS took us.”

Her illuminated phone was meant to take them straight to the coordinates sent her way by Michael, but he must have gotten them wrong. Or perhaps the dense forest kept the location services from working properly. Kate squinted at the screen and checked her roaming settings. No, this seemed to be the right place. Only, it couldn’t be. There wasn’t anything here. She shot off a quick text to Michael.

Why’d you send us out to a random field?

The three little dots appeared. A text followed shortly thereafter. Walk to the edge of the hill. Overlooking town.

“He wants us to look down into town, I think.”

Miller’s Point was something of a geographical oddity. More accurately, it was a linguistic oddity due to its actual lack of a point or nearness to a point. Essentially landlocked and settled into the valley between two high, forested hills, Miller’s Point was a fraud. Miller’s Valley was actually correct, though it didn’t have quite the same ring to it. Kate led the way to the edge of the hill, less than fifty yards ahead of them. When the light from the car’s front bumper finished guiding them, the ambient light from the town below led them the final distance, until they could see Miller’s Point down below.