“It’s just that I care. My whole life, I just wanted to care about me and my own baggage and duty and responsibility. I didn’t know how to care about other people,” he declared, a little too loud but not afraid to let the entire world know his secret. “And now I understand what it means to. I care about you. And this stupid holiday. And your town.”

“So,” Kate breathed on his skin. “Do you think you could give us back the festival?”

“Come again?”

He hadn’t quite heard her. Or, at least, he couldn’t have heard her right. Why on earth was she still talking about the festival? They were together. The town clearly didn’t mind functioning without the festival. They should have been walking on cloud nine, apart from every worry and care of the mortal, un-in-love world. She must have said something else.

“If you get it now, don’t you think you could consider giving us the festival back?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You took it away because you didn’t understand what it means. Now that you get it, I thought maybe you could, y’know. Help us out.”

“Help you out.”

He separated the words. Help. You. Out. Each of the words, he understood individually. In that order, they no longer made sense.

“Yeah.” She nodded.

“I didn’t cancel the festival because I don’t get Christmas,” he explained. In one motion, he extricated himself from their sideways embrace so he could get a good look at her. He turned his back on the singing town. The skin just under his collar started burning. “I cancelled the festival because it’s a financial liability.”

“Right, but it pays back in what it gives to the town. And the people who visit. Like you.”

His stomach dropped.

“Oh.”

“What?”

He saw her clearly for the first time, and he saw himself. The world—spinning with joy only a minute ago—screeched to a slamming halt. Vertigo overtook him. He blinked to steady his vision.

Once, he’d gone on a field trip to a 3-D planetarium on a school field trip. The shock of taking off the glasses during the middle of an illusion had rocked him.

He felt that same way now. All of his illusions and understandings about Kate Buckner turned out to be nothing more than blurry projections, useless colors splashed on a paper-thin screen. Fake. Incorrect. Pathetic of him to buy into it. God, it hurt.

“I’m an idiot,” he declared, meaning it in every sense of the word even as it stabbed him to say so.

“No, you’re not.”

“Yeah. I am.” Swallow. Breathe. Don’t raise your voice. Just state the facts. Letting go of your tight control over yourself is what got you in this mess in the first place. “You’re a liar.”

“Me?”