Hi, darling, have a great Christmas. Love, Mum.

Fat chance.

She imagined her mother’s assistant tentatively putting her head round the door of Fiona’s chaotic office. A reminder to send a gift to your daughter, Professor Carpenter. Her mother would have been irritated by the interruption.

She was relieved and a little proud that she felt nothing. There had been a time when a message like that would have ruined her day, but she was made of tougher stuff now. She’d worked hard to achieve this level of emotional control. Feelings, strong feelings, were inconvenient at best, painful at worst, and she made a point of avoiding them. It made life so much easier, so much smoother, that frankly she didn’t understand why more people didn’t do it. Only last week she’d had to support her assistant through an emotional crisis when her boyfriend had ended the relationship. Alix had handed her a tissue, given her the rest of the day off and refrained from pointing out that if she stayed single nothing like this would ever happen again.

“We’re here, Ms. Carpenter.” The car purred to a halt outside one of New York’s finest hotels, and a uniformed man stepped forward to open the door.

Alix pushed a bill into his hand and walked into the marble foyer.

A huge Christmas tree reached upward, a stylish pyramid of silver and sparkle. Alix found herself thinking of the decorations Holly liked to hang on the tree. A misshapen reindeer she’d baked in the oven. A silver star with uneven points. In her opinion they held more appeal than the glittering symmetry of the ornaments adorning this tree.

Thinking about it brought a rush of warmth.

She was going to have a brilliant family Christmas, just not with her own family.

Her boss, Miles, was waiting for her, phone in hand.

“You were right about that reindeer.” He showed her the screen. “It’s selling so fast we can’t keep the stores stocked.”

It was typical of him to dive straight into work, and that was fine with her.

They walked together toward their tables in the ballroom, talking numbers and strategy.

The room was filling up fast, and when they finally took their seats and the evening began, Alix finally treated herself to a sip of champagne.

She chatted to her colleagues, keeping the conversation light and neutral. When they asked about her plans for the holidays, she told them she’d be spending it with friends in Lapland.

When one of them asked about her family, she brushed the question aside, deflecting as she always did. It really didn’t bother her that her parents had no wish to spend Christmas with her, but it was hard to convince people of that, so she preferred not to talk about it.

It would have been easy for her to hate Christmas, but thanks to Christy she loved it. Her friend’s generosity was something she never took for granted. Their friendship was the most important thing in the world to her. Now that, she thought as she took another sip of champagne, was the one relationship where she allowed her emotions to be engaged. She loved Christy like a sister, and Christy loved her back. Their lives had been intertwined since childhood, and they knew every little detail about one another. She knew that Christy hated peanut butter and always slept with two pillows. She knew that she preferred baths to showers, that she never went to bed without first applying moisturizer and that she threw her mascara away after exactly three months. (She made a note in her diary.) She knew that Christy would always choose to eat a raw carrot over a bowl of ice cream and that she’d only ever been blind drunk once in her life. (Vodka. Never again.) She knew that Christy’s way of handling a difficult situation was to ignore it and that the last thing she did before she went to bed at night was make a list of all the things she had to do the following day.