“Sally? Are you talking about Sally Finley? She still lives here?” Carlette asked.

“Her name is Huddleston now, but yes, she still lives in town,” Ivy said. “She told me the address of her childhood home and described the house across the street where you lived back then. I don’t know what came over me, but one day I just knocked on the door and introduced myself to the man who was living there.”

Carlette’s eyes had a faraway look. “I remember the house on Spruce Street. There was a chinaberry tree in the front yard. With a tire swing. And a one-car garage Sally and I called our clubhouse.”

“The tire swing is gone, but the chinaberry tree is still there,” Lawrence said. “Like me.”

“All these years,” Carlette said wonderingly. “You were right here, Granddaddy, but I had no idea. After Daddy died, I think Mama just wanted to put Tarburton in the past. It was too sad for her. My stepdad, Walter, was a good man. He adopted me when I was ten, and Mama never wanted to look back. Walter was in sales, so we moved around a good bit, and somehow, I lost track.”

“You sent me a postcard from Disney World. I still have it. Along with your high school graduation announcement,” Lawrence said.

“I remember you always sent me birthday and Christmas cards—always with puppies on them, and always with a ten-dollar bill tucked inside,” Carlette said. She made a wry face. “And I probably never wrote back to say thank you. I was such a brat.”

“You were just a kid,” Lawrence said. “I never held it against Diana for remarrying after Ev died. She was too young to stay a widow. Especially with a kid to raise on her own. But I always hoped somehow I’d see you again someday. And now, here you are. And with a son of your own. My great-grandson!” He shook his head. “It’s almost too much for me to take in.”

Carlette looked up at Ivy, who was already feeling like an awkward third wheel in this unlikely and unfolding family reunion. “And it’s all because of you.”

“It wasn’t me,” Ivy insisted. “It was the Santa suit. And Ezra. If he hadn’t insisted on helping me get settled in the farmhouse, hadn’t been such a nuisance about showing up to replace windows and get the furnace working, and move out the Roses’ old furniture and then turn around and move it back in again—I never would have found your note in the jacket pocket.”

“Nobody else would have gone out of their way to figure out what happened to that little girl and her MIA father,” Ezra said. “Nobody else would have been brave enough to buy an old farmhouse, sight unseen, and move to a town where she didn’t know a soul.…”

“Nobody else would have befriended a lonely old geezer like me,” Lawrence said.

“Ivy!”

The bells on the tips of the grown-up elf’s booties jingled as she dashed toward the group assembled in Santaland, dragging along a very tall redheaded young man.