Page 1 of Christmas at the Ranch

Dear Diary,

I met a guy.

I kissed a guy.

Twice, actually. Three times. Four?

Possibly forty.

I kissed him so many times I lost count.

His name is Tate Wilder. He has amber-brown eyes and a voice like hot maple syrup poured on snow. I know you had to wait eighteen years for the story of my first real kiss, but trust me, dear Diary, it was worth the wait…

It all started last night. Another one of my parents’ parties with the crowd of friends and family they invited to this huge “cottage” we’ve rented for the holidays.

Screeches of laughter drifted up through the floorboards, waking me at, according to the clock in my cavern of a bedroom, just past one in the morning.

It’s not really a cottage we’re staying in, it’s a mansion—but at least the monstrosity is perched at the edge of a frozen lake in the Algonquin Highlands, surrounded by snow-topped pines and ice-glazed granite cliffs.

So pretty. So serene. So obvious no one in my family got the memo about peace and quiet.

As I tried to go back to sleep the music started again: Cousin Reuben, playing his New Wave Xmas: Just Can’t Get Enough record for the tenth time.

He and my dad had some kind of falling-out in their thirties and didn’t speak for over a decade.

But apparently, that’s all water under the bridge now because they’re starting some new business venture together.

Earlier in the night I was down in the kitchen, pouring glasses of water and gently suggesting my family members eat some real food instead of nibbling on or ignoring the canapés my mother served before she and Aunt Bitsy got into the martinis.

As I reheated the platters of beef tenderloin and potatoes dauphinoise the hired chef had prepared and no one had touched, I overheard Aunt Bitsy and my mother talking about me.

“She’s so responsible, Cass,” Bitsy said.

Then, in a sotto voice that wasn’t sotto at all, she leaned toward my mother and added, “And a bit boring, honestly.” At this, my mother laughed lightly and looked over at me, her smile apologetic.

But then Bitsy raised her voice and said, “Shouldn’t you be out somewhere, causing trouble with the local boys, Emory?

That’s what I would have been doing at eighteen.

And why didn’t you invite any friends here? Aren’t you bored?”

My parents had suggested I invite a friend or two, and I had to pretend they were all busy over the holidays.

When the truth, as you know, is that I don’t fit in at Blackford Academy, the private school I go to.

Just as I don’t fit in with my family. I even did a science fair project on DNA, asked my parents to provide samples, secretly hoping the findings would reveal I had been switched at birth.

Maybe my real family lived in a cozy house in the suburbs…

Maybe I had brothers or sisters or both…

But no. I’m one hundred percent the only daughter of Cassandra and Stephen Oakes.

My great-great-grandfather opened a distillery in Gananoque during Prohibition and turned it into a booze empire.

My father then added a financial arm of the company, and hoped I would work there with him one day, allowing his ne’er-do-well cousins and other relatives to run the distillery portion of things.

He didn’t take it well this summer when I finally worked up the nerve to tell him I was planning to study journalism instead of business in college.

We’ve been distant with each other ever since.

I guess he thought I was someone else entirely—and, for my part, I’m hurt that when I tried to let him in on my true dreams, he acted like they were nothing.

My mother, meanwhile, used to be a charity fundraising executive but she stopped working outside of the house after I was born and is now known for throwing great parties and overseeing at least one home décor refresh per year.

She still fundraises for charities, but sometimes I wonder if she thinks about why she’s doing it—or if it’s turned into a social thing for her, rather than any sort of philanthropy.

I somehow turned out quiet, studious, introverted—and, up until tonight, someone who had never even had a proper first kiss.

I’m getting to that part.

“Our Emory is eighteen going on forty,” my mother said to Aunt Bitsy—and she may have meant it as a compliment, but I abandoned the platters of food to go back upstairs, feeling stung by her words, laden with even more disappointment than before.

Back in Toronto last month, when my parents told me we were renting a lake house for the December holiday break, I imagined quiet nights in, just the three of us.

Reading by the fire, playing board games.

Exactly the kind of holiday an overly mature eighteen-year-old would want.

Finally, I thought. For my last Christmas officially at home before university next year, they’ve decided to do something they know I’ll love.

My dad has forgiven me for disappointing him.

For wanting to chase my own dream instead of his.

Instead, my parents planned an elaborate three-week party beginning the moment school break started.

And they ignored me when I suggested that sharing a house with the relatives they spend the rest of the year—and portions of their lives—avoiding was probably a bad idea.

Now my dad and Reuben are in business together, and I can’t put my finger on why that feels like trouble, but it does.

Anyway. This is not about them.

Because— the guy . I’m getting there, I promise. I just need to make sure I have all the details straight, so I never forget any of this. I’m like a reporter, and this is my own life—and I finally have an exciting dispatch!

Annoyed by the noise coming up through the floor, I got out of bed to open my window for some fresh air, but was greeted instead by cigar smoke and the loud voice of another one of my father’s cousins—Richard?

Hank?—telling my father what a genius idea all this was.

Who wouldn’t want to stay in a luxury “cottage” on my parents’ dime, eating and drinking for free?

I thought, as the densely bitter-smelling cigar smoke billowed through the window.

I felt so lonely.

But just before I closed the window, I heard a sound. Like a ghost, wailing from the direction of the lake. I think my father and his cousin heard it, too, because they stopped talking abruptly. Then, the howl started up again. It was mysterious, otherworldly, the strangest noise.

My first thought was that maybe someone was hurt, and I had to get outside and help.

I pulled a sweatshirt over my flannel pajamas, found a parka and winter boots by the back stairs, and crept outside.

No one noticed me leave. My father and his cousin had gone back inside through the patio doors.

I stood still, listening, until I heard it once more: the groaning sound bubbling up from underneath the still-thin ice of the lake. I headed for the shore to check it out.

“Hello?” I called. “Is anyone out there? Are you hurt?”

The light of the full moon was fading the stars, but still, I’d never seen so many of them. I stopped walking when I reached the edge of the lake. I looked up and took the cosmos in. I wonder now if I made a wish on all those stars, perhaps for a cure for my loneliness.

I heard the crackling of sparks and embers. I looked to my left and saw a bonfire down the snowy beach, someone sitting in a Muskoka chair, staring into the flames. He was wearing a plaid jacket and a Stetson hat.

“What’s that noise coming from the lake?

” I asked. He waved me over. As I got closer, I realized he was about my age.

He had a strong jaw and full lips—the bottom one fuller than the top.

Eyes that flashed like sparks from his fire.

The words “Wilder Ranch” were stitched in white across the pocket of his flannel jacket.

“It’s the sound the lake makes when it freezes every year,” he explained when I was close, and the way he spoke to me made me feel like we were continuing a conversation we had already started—like I hadn’t just appeared in front of him out of nowhere.

I’ll admit, I forget most of what he said next.

Something about how it was sunny today, so the ice melted a little, and now it was dark, and the ice was refreezing.

Expanding and contracting, science, et cetera.

As he spoke, all I could think about was how his smile flashed at me like a shooting star I wanted to chase, to coax out again and again, to keep for my own.

He stood up from his chair and I realized he was very tall.

I’m tall, too, so it’s nice when I’m not looking down at a person.

Especially a guy. He was slim, kind of gangly, but his shoulders were broad under his flannel.

And his hair, peeking out from beneath that Stetson, was sandy brown with sun-kissed ends, as if he hadn’t had it cut since summer.

He continued with his explanation about why the water made that noise under the ice, but all I could think was how unexpected it was to be standing on the shore of a lake in winter, talking to a handsome guy in front of a bonfire—when moments before I had been stuck in my bedroom, staring down three weeks of misery.

Was I dreaming?

I must have shivered then, and he mistook it for my being cold.

He invited me to come sit by his fire and pulled over another Muskoka chair.

I explained who I was and apologized for all the noise my family was making, disturbing the peaceful setting.

He just shrugged and said it was fine, he hadn’t heard anything, really.

Then he looked over at me and smiled again. I was mesmerized.

“I mean, hey, who doesn’t love hearing ‘Last Christmas’ by Wham! on repeat something like…eleven times?” he said.