Tears pricked at Ivy’s eyes as she ran a fingertip over the note’s childish scrawl. She added the Santa jacket to the box and set it on top of the dresser. It was too cold in the room for pajamas, so she spread her sleeping bag on top of the bedspread, topped it with a colorful patchwork quilt she’d found in the hall linen closet, and crawled, fully dressed, beneath the covers. She’d just turned off the lamp on the nightstand when Punkin leaped onto the bed.

“All right,” she said, stroking the silky fur of his ears. “Just this once. But tomorrow you sleep in your own bed. Understand?” The dog licked Ivy’s neck and burrowed in beside her.

Punkin was snoring softly within minutes, but as tired as she was, Ivy’s brain worriedly ticked away at her growing to-do list.

She’d been excited with what she thought of as the “sexy stuff” like installing a new kitchen, updating bathrooms, and planting her first real garden at the Four Roses farmhouse. But she hadn’t counted on the mundane, potentially budget-busting stuff that hadn’t turned up in the inspection report—but would still need immediate attention—the sagging porch, pothole-pocked driveway, and drafty windows.

In her mind, she ticked off the number of windows in the house. There were four double windows in this bedroom alone. Two or three in the guest bedroom? And all those living room windows that faced on to the front porch? If she kept dwelling on the mounting cost of renovations and her dwindling bank account, she’d never get to sleep.

She yawned and rolled over, catching sight of the Santa suit in the dimly lit room. She began reconsidering the note she’d discovered in the jacket pocket. Who was Carlette, she wondered, and her daddy? And had Santa brought him safely home?

Her thoughts drifted to her own childhood, when she’d posed a similarly impossible request to the mall Santa she’d visited with her grandmother. Somewhere, maybe in the boxes the movers would bring on Monday, she had a photo that documented that visit. Little Ivy Perkins, age six, with the unfortunate bangs her grandmother had insisted upon styling herself, dressed in an itchy green and white smocked dress with clown-like puffed sleeves.

In the photo, her eyes looked sorrowfully upon the mall Santa, an irritable man with halitosis, who’d laughed uncomfortably at her one and only request. “We’ll see,” he’d said, and then he’d shoved her into the waiting arms of a helper elf who’d given her a broken candy cane and a coloring book.

After her grandmother shelled out the $5.99 for the photo, they’d had dinner at the mall’s food court. Ivy had been allowed to order the most exotic dish she’d ever seen, kung pao chicken, and egg rolls from a steam table. Nana had coffee and a slice of pie.

“What did you ask Santa to bring you for Christmas?” Nana asked.

“It’s a secret,” Ivy had whispered, toying with the syrupy orange chicken.