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"Why?" I ask.

"Because you'll knock the ladder, and I'll drop it."

"Drop what?"

He ties something off with a quick double knot and comes down the ladder, leaning down until his face is just above mine. Then I see what's hanging from the hook.

A sprig of mistletoe. Green leaves, white berries, knotted on with red cord.

He's on the bottom rung. I'm on the mat. There's maybe a foot of air between us, and the sprig is hanging right above it.

My pulse kicks hard in my throat.

He doesn't move. Neither do I. His eyes go to my mouth and stay there one second too long, and he looks entirely unbothered about it. I'm bothered enough for both of us.

The bell jangles again behind me. Cold air rushes in at my back.

"Well," says Dottie from the step. "Look at that."

I duck sideways under Arch's arm and out from under the sprig so fast that I bang my hip on the display table of snow globes. Forty little towns shiver.

"It's not up yet," Arch says to Dottie, completely calm, folding the stepladder.

"It's hanging, honey."

"Gran's rule. It doesn't count until the shop opens."

"That was never Ingrid's rule."

"It is now."

Dottie snorts and goes to hang up her coat. I busy myself unwinding my scarf. My face is hot. I'm grateful she's here. I'm also irritated with her, which makes no sense at all.

"Ingrid?" I ask, because it's safer than any other question.

"My grandmother." Arch leans the ladder against the wall. "She hung a sprig over that door every Christmas season for sixty years. Her real rule was nobody gets kissed under it by accident. You have to mean it."

"How do you prove you mean it?"

"You'd know."

I take my coat and scarf to the hook by the register and keep my back to him while I hang them up. That's when I see the rack beside the register, wire with little pegs, holding a dozen spools of red waxed cord.

"You sell the cord," I say.

"By the spool. Half the town buys it in December." He glances at the door, at the sprig, then back at me. "Why?"

"No reason."

There's a sprig on the lamppost at his corner, knotted twice, and another on the bakery's lamppost I passed this morning. Plenty of people buy the cord. Any of them could have tied those knots.

I go back to the wrap counter and start setting out paper.

Sunday is slower than Saturday, and still busy. By ten, I've wrapped a dollhouse, three train sets, and a stuffed bear wearing a ski hat, and I know which of the regulars want plaid and which want snowflakes. Dottie runs the register and tells every customer that I'm "the new girl, came in off the street yesterday, Arch hired her on the spot." She says it with a look at me each time, over her glasses.

The third time, I raise an eyebrow at her.

She raises one back. "I've worked this register thirty-one years. That boy has never hired anybody on the spot."