“Or maybe he left it there, all those years ago, in the hopes that someone like you would find that note and figure out what happened to Carlette’s father.” Ezra raised his head and put a finger under Ivy’s chin. “You know what all you did today, right? You helped my mom connect with her grandfather—her only living relative other than me. You introduced me to my great-grandfather—the one I’m named after. Yeah—while we were walking him to my mom’s car he told me the E in ‘Lawrence E. Jones’ stands for ‘Ezra.’ You played Cupid for your friend Phoebe and her guy, Cody. And let’s not forget—you seem to have single-handedly saved Langley Sweets. You must be exhausted, Ivy Perkins.”

“I keep trying to tell you, it wasn’t me,” Ivy insisted. She pulled the velvet jacket tighter around her shoulders. “It was the power of the Santa suit. I was just the person who happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

She gazed around at the darkened living room, at the homely but well-loved furnishings, the glowing, slightly tilting Christmas tree, and out the front windows, where the twinkling white fairy lights were reflected in the still-falling snow.

“The minute I saw those online photographs of the Four Roses farmhouse, I knew I would buy it,” she said. “I knew I’d found my home.”

“No,” Ezra said, shaking his head. “I think it was the other way around. I think this old place found you. This farmhouse was just standing here, waiting. James told me he’d had other agents wanting to list the place in the past, but the time was never right. And then, suddenly, the time was right. I saw a photo of you, with Punkin, when he was a puppy, and I looked at you and knew the two of you needed to own this old house. When I told James what I found out about his buyer, a woman named Ivy Perkins, he said okay immediately. Because he was waiting, as Bob and Betty Rae would have wanted, to make sure that Four Roses Farm was ending up in the right hands.”

Ezra kissed Ivy’s right and then left palm. “Your hands.”

Then he clasped both her hands between his. “Our hands?”

Punkin roused himself from his nearby nest and sleepily climbed onto the sofa, wedging himself between Ivy’s and Ezra’s intertwined bodies. He licked Ezra’s chin.

Ivy nodded. “Ours.”

Acknowledgments

Dear Readers: Please consider The Santa Suit my holiday gift to you after a life-altering year like 2021. Your support and encouragement have meant everything to me every year over the past three decades, but never more than this past year.

I never intended to write a second book in the year of the pandemic, and in fact, I kept this project a secret until it was almost completely written. But on a long, boring drive to Tybee Island last fall, I had the spark of an idea. My writer pals from Friends & Fiction: Kristin Harmel, Kristy Woodson Harvey, Patti Callahan Henry, and Mary Alice Monroe were kind enough to listen and add their encouragement. Mostly, this Christmas novella was written in bed, during 7 A.M. writing sprints, with my pals cheering me on through lengthy text chains, and my husband, Tom, keeping me alternately supplied with mugs of Earl Grey tea and iced Diet Coke. I’m so grateful to him, our family, and of course, my longtime publishing team: Stuart Krichevsky of the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency, my editor/publisher, Jen Enderlin, and the entire team at St. Martin’s Press, especially the indispensable publicity/marketing duo I have nicknamed Jerica—Jessica Zimmerman and Erica Martirano.