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She sits on the couch and says, “I don’t really want to bump into anyone.”

I get it. I don’t need the rest. St. Mark’s on Christmas Eve is the whole town. Palinski’s parents in the third pew. Half the girls from high school. Mrs. Cole, who still calls my mother about Emma. Teachers. Somebody who probably knows her grandma. Somebody who’s going to turn around in the pew and look at her sitting next to me, and lean over to the person next to them, and by the twenty-sixth, the whole east side of town would know where Tessa Canten spent Christmas.

“Then we’re not going,” I say.

“You can go.”

“I don’t want to.”

She looks at me like she’s checking whether that’s true.

It’s true. I’ve sat in that pew every Christmas Eve since I was born, between my mother and my father in whatever suit she bought me, listening to Reverend Mills talk for forty-five minutes about the light coming into the world while my father checked his watch. I won’t miss it.

I type with my thumb.

Me: We’re going to stay here.

The dots come up.

Mom: Okay. There’s soup in the fridge. Merry Christmas Eve, honey.

I look at it for a second longer than I need to. There was no argument.

At ten after six, the front door closes, and the car goes down the drive, and the gate hums shut at the bottom of the hill.

Tessa extends her foot and rubs my thigh.

I grab it and pull her towards me. She laughs all the way to me.

“Want to go downstairs?” I ask.

She nods.

Downstairs, I turn on the tree and nothing else. Outside the big front window, the snow’s coming down in the light from the drive.

I heat up the soup. I tell her where my mom’s hidden the cookies, so she checks behind the flour, and she smiles at me.

“That’s a terrible hiding spot,” she says, pulling them down.

“It worked for about a week.”

We eat in the front room on the floor, with our backs against the couch and the bowls in our laps and the tree in front of us. Then we get up on the couch, and I put on a movie, something she picks, something with a lot of snow and a woman who owns a bakery.

She sits right next to me. Right against my side, without thinking about it, like it’s just where she sits now.

After a while, she pulls her feet up and rests her head on my shoulder. I pull the blanket off the back of the couch, put it over her, put my arm around her, and pull her in.

She kisses me during the part where the woman is explaining her grandmother’s recipe. I kiss her back. She misses the part where the man finds out the bakery’s been in her family for three generations. I kiss her neck, and she laughs and pulls away, and then comes right back. I pretend I’m watching the movie. She puts her cold feet flat on my stomach under my T-shirt on purpose, and I swear and grab her ankles. She laughs so hard she almost falls off the couch.

“We’re terrible at watching movies,” she says, somewhere around the part with the snowstorm.

“You picked it.”

“You keep distracting me.”

“I’m just sitting here.”

“It’s your eyes,” she says, and kisses me again, and misses the snowstorm.