The Festival was her life. Everyone who worked on it was her family. She was immeasurably glad for the security they gave her. The problem came on Christmas night, when her entire year had been leading up to a grand spectacle of the season. She loved the spectacle, but there was something beautiful and singular about sharing a private Christmas with someone who’d never had one before. For the first time, Kate saw the holiday not through her eyes, but his. The beauty of this holiday she loved so much now engulfed her. The lights shone brighter. The classic lines of It’s a Wonderful Life cut deeper. Her faith renewed.

When It’s a Wonderful Life went into its encore showing, Kate stretched her tight muscles along the overstuffed couch. Clark, for his part, sprawled out in a distinctly Victorian armchair. Wide, decorative walls of the chair obscured his face behind their panels while the roaring fireplace illuminated his long limbs.

“Clark? Clark, are you awake?” she whispered. Half of her didn’t want to disturb him, while the other half of her demanded she wake him up. It wasn’t even midnight, after all. There was so much Christmas left and so little time to prove its worth to him. Fortunately, he saved her the trouble of waking him.

“Yeah, I’m awake,” he whispered back, as though they were in a crowded movie theater instead of his own living room.

The next phase of Kate’s plan wasn’t really for him. It wasn’t even part of the plan. She’d been doing Christmas without parents for most of her life, which meant she was fairly stuck in her ways. There was one tradition she refused to compromise on.

“I was wondering… Do you have a copy of A Christmas Carol?”

“No idea. Why?”

“I read it every Christmas Eve.”

She thought she’d brought her own copy for such a scenario, but a quick scan of her backpack earlier in the evening revealed only pajamas, a change of clothes for Christmas Day, a toothbrush, and a box of white chocolate pretzels. Perhaps during her packing she assumed the multimillion-dollar mansion would contain at least one copy of the greatest novella in the English canon; if she had a manor and an estate, she’d have a million copies. It was, after all, her favorite book.

“Really? But don’t you…” Clark leaned forward, popping out from behind the panels of his chair to scoff in disbelief, “You basically watch A Christmas Carol every day for like, a month and a half, don’t you?”