Sarah loved the addition of sleigh rides to the On-The-Square Christmas Festival. For the past few years, she’d wanted to go, had always thought a sleigh ride as something super romantic and straight from a fairy tale. Richard had thought the sleigh rides a silly waste of money and had refused to go even when Sarah had offered to pay. She should have known right then and there that he wasn’t the man for her.

How had she ever thought he was?

Thinking back, maybe she had known all along that she and Richard weren’t really meant to be. She just hadn’t wanted to acknowledge that Richard hadn’t been right for her.

Why? For fear of being alone?

No, she wasn’t afraid to be alone. Maybe it was more that she’d been so anxious to have what her parents had had before her mother died, what Ruby and Charlie had enjoyed for fifty-plus years.

But maybe that life wasn’t for her. Maybe she was meant to live alone, as Aunt Jean and Maybelle had done.

She glanced toward Bodie, wondering what he thought of sleigh rides. He was leaving. Soon. Yet the idea of a going on a sleigh ride with him, with him looking at her the way he’d been doing moments before, appealed far more than it should.

Sliding an empty box that had held ornaments under a table, Bodie didn’t seem to be thinking about sleigh rides or their moment at all.

When he straightened, he slid his hands into his jean pockets. “Anything else you need me to do before we head to the ornament hunt?”

Yes. I need you to tell me what you were going to say to me before Rosie showed up. I need to know if I imagined that you wanted to kiss me.

Even if Rosie wasn’t standing there, Sarah wouldn’t have said the words out loud, but oh, how she wished she knew the answers.

To cover her wayward thoughts, she glanced at her watch. “It is about time we head toward the church.”

The ornament hunt was held a block over from the square at the church’s playground.

From inside the community room, Sarah, Bodie, and a couple of other volunteers gathered bags of prize-stuffed plastic ornaments and headed to the playground to “hide” them.

Bodie had attached Harry’s leash to a fence post and the dog barked when he spotted them.

“I hate that he’s tied up,” Sarah mused as they began hiding ornaments around the playground.

“Better that than him finding the ornaments and demolishing them before your kids have a chance to hunt them.”

“He might think he was in the greatest game of Christmas Fetch ever.” Sarah smiled at the image of Harry happily hunting the ornaments.

Bodie chuckled. “Possibly. Either way, Harry and all these ball-shaped ornaments wouldn’t be a good combination.”