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Holly scooted up onto a stool, and Levi slid her a cup of coffee. She looked between the two of them. “The magic, huh? I thought Tara was kidding when she said you all believed this place was magic.”

“Oh no”—Levi shook his head—“we absolutely all believe it’s magic, whether we want to or not. If you ask Miri, it’s pure concentrated Cass, baked into the walls. If you ask Hannah, it’s all of the love from the past sixty years.”

“And you?” Holly asked.

“My best guess is a forest spirit manifested by the cat,” he said, handing her a cookie.

She chewed for a minute. “This is wrong. You left out something.” Thinking for a minute, she said, “Almond extract. The original has almond extract.”

“Ha!” Miriam pointed at Levi. “I told you people would notice, but no, fancy chef man said no almond extract.”

“Well, fine. Holly can make the next batch!” he said, handing her a mixing bowl. She was more than happy to do so.

“So what does the magic do, exactly?” she asked, scooting off her stool and moving behind the counter so she could work more easily.

“It brings people here. People call it the island of misfit toys, but it’s not any misfits,” Miriam explained. “It’s people running from home or looking for one. People who have lost their way back home or never had one. If the thing wrong with your life is, at its core, not related to home, I don’t know, I assume you end up at some other magical inn to get fixed.”

Kringle, who had wandered in and settled on the stool Holly had abandoned, chirped at them.

Holly considered this. “So, Tara’s here because she… needs to leave home? Because Cole is her real home?” She checked the recipe, which was, for unknown reasons, written on an airplane napkin.

Levi raised an eyebrow. “The real question is, why are you here?”

Holly was surprised. “Me? I’m just keeping Tara company.”

“Incorrect! No one shows up in this kitchen at three a.m. unless Carrigan’s brought them here. So. Tell us. Why aren’t you home for Christmas? And, second question, equally important: You’re obviously a talented baker—why don’t you work in food?” Levi pointed at her, in mock accusation.

“Miriam’s a very talented baker and she doesn’t work in food!” Holly protested.

“Not everyone is a weirdo who makes their whole life and career revolve around an art they’re passionate about like us, Blue,” Miriam told him. “Maybe Holly is in love with waitressing.”

They looked at her, right as she took a bite of cookie. “Um,” she said, chewing carefully, “it’s more, like, poverty trauma and not wanting to participate in capitalism? Also some wanderlust?”

Miriam and Levi seemed to have a wordless conversation, which ended in them both speaking at once.

“Is waitressing making you enough money to outrun the poverty trauma?” Miriam asked.

While Levi said, “Baking is a pretty primal, pre-capitalist urge. Feeding people, creating bread?”

She answered Miriam first. “I’m broke now, but I’m never stuck without options, and I’m never hungry. It’s not, I’ll admit, a perfect system.”

They both nodded, as if they deeply understood not wanting to be stuck, if not from poverty.

“As for why I’m not baking as a career…” She stirred the cookie dough harder than it needed, trying to be as brave as Tara thought she was and tell the truth. “I guess I started waitressing as a temporary step, something I knew I could always fall back on, and then my plan B became my plan A. Because if I started a business, it could fail and I’d lose everything. Right now I have nothing to lose.”

“That’s depressing,” Levi said.

Miriam threw a ball of dough at him. “Be nice. I spent a lot of time with nothing to lose while I was healing. Holly probably has her reasons for living a life she doesn’t really like.”

What the hell, these people were brutal.

“You’re mean, and I’m taking your cookies,” Holly said, pulling the plate toward her.

“You can’t,” Miriam told her seriously. “They taste wrong, and you need to get this last batch in the oven. While you’re working, tell us your reasons for living a life you don’t really like.”

Ugh, these people were going to make her talk about feelings. “You won’t understand. Everyone here is so kind to each other.”

Levi and Miriam exchanged another wordless conversation. “Us?” Levi asked. “The two of us, specifically, are two of the most self-centered people you’ll ever meet. We just learned how to not give in to our most self-centered impulses so we could be part of our family.”