Page 27 of The Christmas We Built

Nora looked at the horses, then at the snow blowing through the open doorway. “We’ll stay here.”

“Smart choice. I’ll bring blankets, a lantern, sandwiches, and coffee.”

“Good coffee?” Nora asked.

“I said coffee.”

She returned a few minutes later with a thermos, blankets, sandwiches in wax paper, and a battery lantern. A strip of masking tape on it said MORRISON in her husband’s handwriting. Everything in that barn was labeled by a man who had been dead eleven years. Through the snow behind her, one battery-powered string of colored bulbs glowed along the farmhouse porch rail, with half the red bulbs burned out.

At the door, Mrs. Morrison paused and looked directly at me. “Nora has done my paperwork for six years and never asked me for a thing. Today she asked me to give you a chance.” Her eyes narrowed. “Don’t make her regret it.”

Then she stepped into the snow and pulled the door shut. That left Nora and me with two horses and a sleigh built by a man from wood cut on the Henderson property.

Nora found the only dry blanket and sat beside me on the hay bale. She opened it across both our shoulders and laps.

“There’s barely enough for one person,” I said.

“Then move closer.” She tucked the edge around my side. “It’s a blanket, Griffin, not a merger. You can share it without filing paperwork.”

I moved closer. Her thigh pressed against mine, and her shoulder fit beneath my arm. A loose strand of her hair brushed my jaw when she settled against me. Nobody had noticed I was cold in years. My first instinct was to find a way to repay her. My second was to turn my face and kiss her until neither of us remembered the storm. I did the only safe thing and pulled the blanket higher around both of us. “Thank you.”

Nora poured coffee into the two enamel cups Mrs. Morrison had tucked under the thermos strap and handed me one. Her fingers brushed mine, and I forgot the storm for a second. “So,” she said. “What do we do until the plow comes?”

I had my phone in my hand. The call log was still open on it—CRANE, V., four minutes eleven seconds—and I got as far as turning the screen toward the lantern.

Then I put it face down on the hay bale and said, “Tell me about Holly Creek.”

CHAPTER 9

NORA

An hour later, the propane heater had taken the edge off the cold, and Griffin sat on the bale opposite me. I kept the blanket over my knees while he held the enamel cup in both hands, listening as if Holly Creek had an answer he needed.

We’d been talking for an hour about Frank’s father’s transom, the year the choir director quit in October, and the Hendersons and their cart. He listened completely, with no reply loaded behind mine. The lantern marked eight feet of light. The rest of the barn belonged to the horses.

My phone buzzed in my jacket.

Pearl