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Holly did not want to explain any of this to her family, who tended to view her with loving and supportive yet overbearing bafflement. When she’d gotten married at eighteen, they’d helped hot-glue dollar store flowers to a plastic garden arch Ivy found on Craigslist. When she’d gotten divorced at twenty-two, they’d come over to help her pack and given her zero lectures about familial responsibility. No one had even said I told you so.

When she didn’t make it home for holidays, year after year, her mom wrapped her presents in perfectly folded corners and big coordinating bows and carefully packed them with packing peanuts, shipping them to wherever she was.

Apparently, she’d hit the limit of Christmases she could miss before her mom ran out of patience. Maybe it was because both of her siblings were home now, or because Dustin was whispering in their ears like Littlefinger that it was Holly’s duty as the youngest daughter to take care of them. Maybe her mom’s biological clock was starting to tick on Holly’s behalf now that she was firmly in her thirties.

They knew she wasn’t running from them, specifically. Just from… turning out like them. Rational or not, it felt like going home for Christmas was a trap, and she would find herself drawn back into the comfort of the known. She’d end up spending Wednesday nights in the bar down the street with people she’d gone to elementary school with, in the kind of job that you couldn’t skip out on to have an adventure without getting fired and being late on rent, and then she’d get mean. At least with her life right now, when she got fired and couldn’t make rent, she could get in the car and drive.

She should call her family, but she was having too much fun at Carrigan’s, and she didn’t want to feel guilty about it.

She turned her phone over.

“Ooh,” Levi said, looking over her shoulder, “who are we avoiding?”

“My sister,” Holly said.

He nodded. “Sisters are complicated. Why are you avoiding yours?”

“You remind me of Cole,” she said, hoping to distract him into dropping the subject, because she didn’t know the answer herself. “You both have no idea where the boundary of ‘not your business’ is.”

He threw back his head and laughed. “Welcome to Carrigan’s,” he said. “But also, touché. Shall I escort you back to your beautiful girlfriend so you can stop being assaulted by my various in-laws?”

She nodded enthusiastically, and she had to remind the butterflies in her stomach that she didn’t actually have a beautiful girlfriend.

Chapter 15

Tara

This day was remarkably unstructured for one Hannah had planned. It seemed that even her supernatural powers of organization couldn’t stand against the chaos force of the assembled Rosensteins and Old Ladies.

Everyone was milling around, chatting in the great room, noshing in the dining room, lounging on the porch. It was making Tara twitchy. She needed to do something useful, or at least with an itinerary. She thought she might be needed to babysit Ziva, but Ziva was happy as a clam (or whatever the kosher equivalent was), playing host to all the Rosensteins she’d been semi-estranged from for years.

Sitting next to Holly on a couch in the corner of the great room, Tara didn’t even realize she was anxious until Holly put a hand on her bouncing knee and stopped its movement.

“I’ll bet it would help Hannah out if you roped some of these people into an activity of some kind,” Holly whispered, her breath tickling Tara’s ear and raising goose bumps on her arm.

Tara loved that Holly knew her well enough to understand why she couldn’t sit still. She laced their fingers together. “What would we do? We can’t exactly go hiking, or boating, or out for a picnic in this weather.”

Holly acknowledged this with a dip of her head. “There are downfalls to a white Christmas.”

“Yeah, it’s cold as shit, and wet, and the snow gets everywhere.” Tara shook her body in disgust. “I’ll take a low-country Christmas any day.”

Holly laid her head on Tara’s shoulder. “I wish we could have stayed in bed all day instead of being sociable, but your friends need you, and I know you never let anyone down when they need you. So, what can we do with a whole bunch of people before it’s even time for lunch?”

“Hey! Coco!” Tara called, and Cole’s head snapped up from across the room.

“Wait, weren’t you complaining about everyone else here calling each other ridiculous nicknames?” Holly asked, pulling away and laughing. “Coco?!”

Tara ignored this, turning to Cole as he and Sawyer walked up. “If anyone in this godforsaken hotel knows where there’s a karaoke machine, it’s you.”

Cole’s eyes lit with the kind of glee that he usually reserved for doxxing white nationalists and exposing them to their employers after they marched with swastika flags in the streets.

“Karaoke?! Oh, my love, my light! Better half of my heart! You are a genius of epic proportions,” he cried, clapping. “To the barn!”

Tara looked around at the crowd. “How are we going to wrangle them all?”

“Oh, I’m on it,” Holly said, slipping out of her Docs and standing up on the couch. “Excuse me!” Her voice carried over the room, pitched to get the attention of the most recalcitrant drunk midnight diner customer. “As much as you’re all obviously enjoying Mrs. Matthews’s superb coffee and the variety of pastries graciously provided by the Rosensteins—you all really know how to make babka—”

A cheer rose from the crowd.