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Actually, once Tara got to hold her, she had to admit that she was less weird-looking than Tara’s own nieces had been at that age. She already, at a week old, had a head of hair like Miriam’s, and Tara thought she might look an awful lot like her aunt Mimi, who in turn was the spitting image of her great-aunt Cass. Though she did, perhaps, have her father’s judgmental eyebrows.

Tara knew from Hannah that there’d been some drama between Rachel and Felicia over the baby’s name. Levi and Hannah had, initially, considered naming her after Cass’s Hebrew name, Rivka, as the first baby born into the family after Cass’s death. But Rachel’s Sephardic upbringing and Felicia’s Ashkenazi one differed on naming traditions, and there had been intense back-and-forth.

As a result, once Levi and Hannah had settled on what they thought her name might be, they hadn’t breathed even a word of a hint to anyone. All inquiries as to whether or not she would be called an English name that coincided with her Hebrew name, or given something totally different, were passed off with a smile on Hannah’s part or a growling and hissing on Levi’s.

At the ceremony, Hannah read from the “Song of Songs” and the baby was given the name Kezia, who was, Cole whispered, a daughter of Job. (Cole knew a weird amount about the Bible for a dude who insisted he definitely for sure never wanted to go to divinity school.)

Because Kezia was also a word for cassia, or cinnamon, and the child’s father was, after all, a chef, they gave her another spice for her English name—Clove.

“You’ve named her after eggnog,” Mrs. Matthews pointed out, laughing.

Hannah smiled. “Well, she may have been born in June, but she is a Christmasland baby.”

Her cousin, Grant, asked to hold her. Jayla and Jeremiah Green sat on either side of him, like bookends. Tara snapped a picture on an old Polaroid they’d found in Cass’s things. On the bottom, she wrote:

The heirs of Cassiopeia

She didn’t notice, until Holly pointed it out, that Kringle was peeking over the back of the chair, carefully guarding the next Carrigan’s generation.