“Want to tell me what happened?” Miss Carolyn asked.

“No ma’am.”

“You sure?”

Kate squirmed. The day’s events weighed squarely on her shoulders, pressing down until she feared they might flatten her altogether. Her heart—like the flat line of her voice—remained placid and unbothered, but the pressure on her back increased.

“No. I’m not sure,” she confessed.

“Tell you what. Why don’t we go to the square and get some hot chocolate and some songs into you—”

“No.” Kate barked. Off of Miss Carolyn’s shocked look, she attempted to recover. Just because she no longer cared didn’t mean she had to forget her manners. She corrected herself. “No, thank you. Just take me to my apartment, please.”

“Your apartment?” Miss Carolyn spluttered.

“Yes ma’am.”

“By yourself? On Christmas?”

“Yes ma’am.”

Eyes trained forward, hands folded in her lap, Kate didn’t dignify Miss Carolyn with a response to her clear shock. She would not be deterred, even if the older woman gripped the steering wheel as if she drove the escape car from a botched bank robbery instead of through the empty streets of Miller’s Point. Going to the town square to feign happiness as she sang lying songs about all of creation singing gloria appealed to her about as much as diving into a pit of live, starving snakes.

Her initial assessment proved incorrect. She wasn’t actually empty or dead to the little voices interpreting her body’s reactions into categories like sadness or rage. All of those things existed within her, they just couldn’t be heard over the one dominating force controlling her entire view of the world at present.

Bitterness.

She was, plain and simply put, bitter.

“Are you feeling all right?”

“I failed,” she said, twisting her hands together. Her voice was black coffee. Her eyes were probably darker.

“Oh, honey. You didn’t fail.”

Miss Carolyn’s pity burned her, hot acid on her skin.

“I let everyone down. I tried to get the festival back and I failed.”

“Michael and Emily told me about your plan.”

“But that wasn’t all. He was so broken.” She placed a hand over her own icy heart. “Frozen. I thought maybe if he understood what I saw in this holiday—”

“He’d understand why we love our festival so much.”

“No!” What had she done in her life to make everyone think she couldn’t possibly really care about this man? Or did everyone, including Clark himself, think him so beyond redemption the idea of her trying to rescue him from a life of loss and misery was completely outside of the realm of possibility? “I thought maybe I could save him. I thought maybe he was just a Scrooge, you know? He needed to see the value in people. And himself. And he’d just open himself up.”

To love. To me.

“What happened?”