Kate Buckner was on a roll, as far as rants went. Since arriving almost thirty minutes ago, she’d yammered nonstop, flooding her companion and the empty restaurant with her every stray thought. The faster she spoke, the faster they came, leaving her to race to catch up.

“But you know what I really can’t stand?”

It was 7:15 on the morning of Christmas Eve, and for the first time since she was seven years old, Kate wasn’t ironing a petticoat or setting up trays of mince pies. For once, she sat at the end of the bar at Mel’s Diner, drinking a steaming cup of coffee and relishing the hearty scents of bacon and maple syrup. On a regular morning in, say, March, the old diner was the greatest breakfast joint in the known universe.

But this Christmastime? She hated it. Mel’s was a staple of the Miller’s Point diet and she came in here at least once a week, but that was part of the problem. Without the festival, this felt like just another Tuesday. Bing Crosby’s holiday standards on the old jukebox just weren’t enough to convince her this was actually Christmas Eve.

“What can’t you stand?”

Michael Newman, her breakfast companion and best friend since they were cast as Fred and Fred’s wife in high school, couldn’t have been more different than Clark Woodward. Where the out-of-towner played perpetual poker, Michael slapped himself open and let you read every page of him. He was the all-American type, dark-skinned with a smile that could light up a football stadium on its own, the exact image of a small-town golden boy. She always assumed he’d be mayor one day, but now she wasn’t sure if the town would be around long enough for him to make the leap from ranch medic to political mastermind. For a long time, town gossip had it that the two of them, the town’s two favorite children, would end up married, but she could never imagine it. They were like two trees planted too close together. Their branches intertwined and they shared the same soil, but they’d never become one. She only thought of him as a friend.

“What I really can’t stand is that he has the audacity to stand there and mansplain to me about economics. Of course the festival doesn’t make money for them, but it makes money for us, and that helps keep the town—the town where his business is, I’ll remind you—afloat. What’s he gonna do about workers when they all move to Fort Worth or something because there’s not enough money circulating here? Huh?”

“I don’t know, Kate.”