She thought about poor Ivy Belmont and wished the girl hadn’t run away on her. She hadn’t been planning on giving her a hard time. She wanted to help. A girl didn’t steal tampons and pads unless she was desperate.

  Finally Garret received his change and headed toward her.

  “How’s Kate?” She heard the bite behind her question and realized that she was feeling a bit jealous. The very idea was a worry.

  “Fine. She wasn’t at Frosty Frolics last night, but she’s already heard about the baby. I guess everyone in Carol Falls has by now.”

  So that’s what they’d been talking about.

  “One hot cocoa and a chocolate-dipped shortbread biscuit.” Garret set a thick ceramic mug and a small plate with a candy-cane shaped cookie on the table in front of her.

  “Thanks.” She hadn’t asked for the cookie, but it looked delicious.

  He went back to the counter and returned with black coffee and another cookie for himself. He settled into his chair and focused his attention on her. “So what was going on with Ivy?”

  Lily sighed. She didn’t like ratting out the teenager, but she was pretty sure Garret would be understanding. “I caught her slipping two boxes of feminine hygiene products into her coat jacket. I’m sure she wouldn’t have done it if money wasn’t really tight at home. The Belmonts are on the Christmas basket list, aren’t they?”

  “Yeah. This is the first year. Her father, Oliver, used to have a good job with the city. But council voted in cuts and the Mayor let him go. After that, I hired him for a few months, but it didn’t work out.”

  “What happened?” she asked quietly.

  “We have a zero tolerance for alcohol, as you know.”

  She nodded. Sylvia had gone over this on her first day. Not that it had been particularly relevant in her case.

  “Chet was the first to tell me he thought Oliver was drinking on the job.”

  “Was he always a drinker?”

  “According to his wife, no. The problem started after he was fired. I guess he figured he had a career for life, with a guaranteed pension. And he didn’t handle the disappointment well. We started watching him more closely and one afternoon I caught him in the act. I immediately sent him home, docked his pay and told him if it happened a second time he’d be fired.”

  “And it did happen again?”

  “Afraid so. I hated to let him go, since I guessed his drinking would only get worse if he didn’t have any job at all. But it was a safety issue for us. And I would have felt even worse if he’d injured himself at work because he was impaired.”

  “You didn’t have a choice.”

  “I offered to pay for a rehab program or counseling if he preferred. He reacted as if I’d insulted him, and stormed off the property.” Garret rubbed his eyes, as if he’d like to erase the entire incident from his memory.

  “That’s sad. What about Ivy’s mother?”

  “Verna works hard as a cleaning woman. She comes out to the Farm one day a week. And I know she cleans for Kate here at the cafe, and for the mayor’s family, too. But the Belmont’s have five kids to feed and clothe and that money can’t go far.”

  “How old are the other children?”

  “I honestly don’t know. The twins are little more than toddlers. Then a couple who are older, but no more than nine or ten, I would guess.”

  “I wonder who looks after the little ones when she’s cleaning. The ones who are too young for school.”

  “I guess it would be her husband.”

  “Do you think he drinks when he should be taking care of them?”

  Garret’s troubled gaze was her answer.

  “Oh, dear.” Lily took a bite of her cookie then a sip of the cocoa. Both were delicious but it was hard to enjoy them when she was wondering if the Belmont children would have enough to eat that day. “The Christmas basket should help them through December, at least.”

  “It’s a start,” Garret agreed.

  “But I’d like to do more. I want to help Ivy—I’m just not sure how.”

  “We’ll both try to think of something,” he said. “By the way, I saw you purchase the turkey vouchers at the Market. I thought you were going to take the weekend off. No work, remember?”

  “Oh, picking up the vouchers hardly counts as work.”

  Garret leaned over the table, his gaze disturbingly probing.

  What did he see, she wondered?

  Her golden hair was natural and she kept in good shape. But the last few years had been tough on her self esteem—among other things. Which made it difficult to trust that light in Garret’s eyes when he looked at her. Once she would have been confident that it meant he found her attractive.

  But it was harder now.

  “You know we shut down Frost Farms from December twentieth until the New Year,” Garret reminded her. “What are you going to do with your holidays?”

  Good question. She gave him a brave smile. “I ordered a stack of books from Amazon. I plan to put my feet up and relax.” In theory the idea was good. Or so she’d thought two weeks ago.

  “Why not visit your family? Sorry—I don’t mean to be nosy. But with two weeks off, you’d definitely have the time to fly to Colorado.”

  He’d asked about her family before. She’d always managed to change the subject.

  But this time, she found that she wanted to tell him. Not everything. But a little.

  “My sister is amazing. She and her husband are engineers and they run their household so efficiently you’d never guess they have three young children.”

  “Are they too efficient?” Garret guessed.

  “No. That’s the thing. They still manage to have fun and you can tell the children are happy. They’re like—perfect.” She sighed.

  “I see,” Garret said.

  And she had a feeling he did. “I love my family. But the last couple of years my life hasn’t been so great. And I know if I went home I’d only feel like a failure.”

  “But why? You’re lovely. And smart. I can’t believe what you’ve managed to achieve for us in just two months.”

  “I’m glad you’re happy with my work.”

  He reached out to touch her hand. “More than your work, Lily.”

  The cafe suddenly felt too warm to her. She was thinking of baby Holly again, and her nose was tingling, a sure sign she was on the verge of crying. “I should get going. Thank you for the cocoa and the cookie.”

  “But you haven’t finished either one.”

  “I need to get my groceries home. And your mother will be done at the clinic soon, I’m sure.”

  He glanced at his phone. “You’re uncanny. She just sent me a text. The baby had an all-clear from the doctor.”

  “That’s good.”

  “It is.”

  Still, he seemed to get to his feet with some reluctance. “Need a lift?”

  She wanted to say yes. She wanted to sit beside him in his truck and have him walk her to her door again, the way she knew that he would if she let him.

  But those were dangerous yearnings. He wasn’t just an attractive man with a good heart and a chivalrous streak. He was a family man. A father. “It’s only two blocks. And I enjoy walking.”

  * * *

  Once Garret had his mother and baby Holly back at Frost Farms, they both went down for a nap. Harold, who’d been keeping an eye on his grandson while everyone was away, suggested he might do the same thing. That meant he and his son were left to their own devices.

  “What do you want to do, Duncan? Should we put on our skates and you can take shots at me? Or would you rather go tobogganing?”

  Duncan looked up from the picture he’d been drawing at the dining room table. “Can we go to our old house, Dad?”

  “Oh?” Garret checked in on the place once a week for insurance reasons. But he never took Duncan with him.

  “I want to see the room I had when I was a baby.”

  Garret studied his son’s face, wondering what had brought this on, and decided it must have been the sudden appearance of Holly in their lives.

  “You still remember your bedroom at the other house?”

  “I think so.”

  When Sara died, Duncan had still been sleeping in the nursery. They’d planned to move him into a ‘big boy’ room, in fact Sara had picked out the paint. But it had been fall and Garret had been busy and had put the job off, thinking he still had months before the baby would be born.

  But life hadn’t worked out the way any of them had planned.

  * * *

  The house Garret had lived in with Sara was on the other side of the farm, with a separate lane connecting it to the main road. Even seven years ago, when he’d married Sara, he’d known he wanted to spend his life working at the family business and she’d supported that.

  “We’ll have our own place, though, right?” she’d asked.

  “Of course.” He’d built this house knowing of Sara’s heart condition and assuming it would always be just the two of them. The tidy Art and Crafts structure was much smaller than the house where he’d been raised, but it had an awesome porch that ran along the entire front of the house. They’d painted it a mossy green and shingled it with dark gray cedar shakes. Two large maple trees grew on either side of the front door. The driveway was kept plowed, thanks to Chet, and he drove right up to the garage, before turning to see how his son was doing.

  “Does it look familiar?”

  Duncan nodded. “I remember the swing.”

  Hanging by a rope from the limb of one of the maples was a bucket swing, the kind that was used for toddlers. Garret had been planning to put up a tire swing that summer, on the other tree. One swing for each of his children...

  As he and Duncan went up the porch stairs, he couldn’t help thinking of Lily and wondering what she would think of the house. The wicker furniture that had once sat out here had been stored in the garage. Sara’s geraniums were long dead and the black urns that had contained them were filled with nothing but packed dirt.

  Garret unlocked the door. Duncan sat on the mat and tugged off his boots. “It smells funny in here.”

  “That’s the smell of an empty house.”

  “I like the smell of filled-up houses better.”

  They toured the main floor, Garret checking for leaks and testing the toilets. Everything looked fine. It was a good, solid house.

  Upstairs, Duncan ran into his old bedroom first. There was the wooden crib and change table, empty shelves which had once held his books and toys and the rocking chair where both he and Sara had spent countless hours with their son.

  “Where are the toys?”

  “We took them with us when we moved to Grandma and Grandpa’s.” Of course most of them had since been donated to Goodwill as Duncan’s interests were now far beyond wooden puzzles and the toy cars that had fascinated him when he was three.

  Garret opened one of the bureau drawers. All of his and Duncan’s clothes had been moved to his parents, but the baby clothes—the ones Sara had intended to reuse when their new baby was born—were still here.

  He picked up a pile of little sleepers, for once not thinking about the baby, so wanted, so loved, who had never survived to wear them, but of another, living, breathing child. He might as well take these home for baby Holly to wear. “Do you want anything from this room?” he asked his son.

  “No. This is all baby stuff.” Duncan gave the mobile hanging over the crib a disdainful twirl. “I was really little when we lived here.”

  “You were.”

  “Will this be my room when we move back?”

  Garret stared at him in surprise. “Don’t you like living with Grandma and Grandpa?”

  “Sure. But isn’t this our real house?”

  Garret couldn’t understand why his son would feel that way. He’d been so young when they moved out.

  “What’s this room, Dad?” Duncan had moved down the hall to the second bedroom.

  “This was going to be your big boy room.”

  “I was going to have bunk beds, right?”

  Again Garret was amazed at how much his son remembered. “We could buy bunk beds for your room at grandma and grandpa’s if you want.”

  But Duncan was running again, this time to the biggest room at the end of the hall.

  Once, entering their old bedroom had been painful for Garret. About a month after Sara died, on an especially bleak day, Garret had put the entire master suite up for sale on an Internet bargain site. It had been sold in three hours. He’d given Chet the keys to the house and asked him to supervise the pickup by the new owners.

  They’d taken everything. Even the sheets and the bed cover.

  So now the room was a blank slate, with only the pale blue of the walls to make him think of Sara. One gallon of latex paint and that would be gone, too.

  “Wow, Dad. We could play floor hockey in here!”

  Garret laughed. “That’s one idea, I guess.”

  They went back to the kitchen then, and while Garret checked the appliances and the sink faucet, Duncan opened a few drawers, took things out, looked at them, then put them back.

  “I used this spoon when I was a baby, didn’t I, Dad?”

  “Yup. It was part of a set. There should be a bowl and a little plate, too. Your Aunt Joey gave you that when you were born.”

  Duncan dragged over a chair so he could reach a cupboard over the counter. “Here’s the bowl! I remember Mommy putting it here.”

  Garret’s throat thickened, as he watched his son with bittersweet pride.

  Duncan must have sensed the change in his father’s mood, though, because he suddenly looked worried. “Is it okay to keep remembering, Mommy?”

  “Of course it is, Duncan. It’s a very good thing.”

  After lunch, Garret made a final check of the house, then gathered the baby clothes for Holly and ushered Duncan out the front door. As they left the porch, Garret glanced again at the empty planters. A random thought crept past his memories into the void where his future would be.

  What kind of flowers would Lily have planted?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Garret thought about Lily a lot that evening. His feelings for her had shifted ever since the night of Frosty Frolics—the night Holly had appeared in the manger. He could no long keep up the pretense that he wasn’t attracted to her—and that he didn’t long to get to know her much better.

  He thought about her when he was feeding Holly her bottle at two in the morning, and he thought about her when he was making pancakes for the family five hours later. He opted out of church, to stay with the baby and then, after lunch, when the entire family settled in to watch a football game on TV, he thought of her again.

  She kept insisting that she was fine.

  But he’d seen something vulnerable in her eyes yesterday at the cafe.

  He just knew something was troubling her.

  And then there was the problem of Ivy Belmont’s shoplifting. They really needed to talk about that. And take action. Ivy was a good kid and he didn’t want to see her end up in trouble.

  At the end of the first quarter, Garret realized it was time to stop thinking and time to take action.

  “Mom, do you mind keeping an eye on Duncan? I need to go into town for a few hours.” He didn’t say what for, and his mother didn’t ask. She just nodded that he should go.

  “You’ll be home in time for dinner?”

  As if he’d dare not be. Sunday dinner at the Frost home was sacrosanct. “Sure will.” He hesitated, then added, “And I just may bring a guest along with me.”

  * * *

  He phoned Lily from his car. “I was thinking it would be a good idea to drop in on the Belmonts. Check on things and talk to Ivy about her shoplifting. Want to come with me?”

  He’d guessed that no matter what she was doing, Lily wouldn’t be able to resist saying yes. Still, he added, “Unless you’re busy...?”

  “The laundry can wait,” Lily said. “I’ll put my coat on and be waiting for you at the door.”

  She looked so pretty in her gray wool coat and red hat, that Garret felt his mood lifting the second he saw her. She was sweeping the latest dusting of snow off her front steps, but put away the broom once she spotted him.

  “Mind if we walk to the Belmonts?” The day was cloudy, but it was warm, and he liked the idea of strolling through Carol Falls with Lily by his side. “It’s only five blocks or so.”

  “Good idea.”

  He could see the New York girl in her smile, today. God, but she was beautiful. He wondered why it had never before struck him as strange that someone as amazing as her would choose to leave the Big Apple and move to a tiny place like Carol Falls.

  Hopefully one day she would tell him the whole story. Right now it was easy to feel optimistic and believe that there were many intimate conversations in their future.

  As they strolled along the road—there were no sidewalks on this street—they chatted about the weather and a few items that had been featured on the morning news. Safe topics that wouldn’t push any buttons for either of them.

  Within a few blocks, the houses started looking a little rundown. This was the poor section of town, and it was pretty obvious. When they reached the Belmont’s bungalow it was clear that they’d ended up at the worst of the bad. Garret had heard that the Belmont’s had lost their house and been forced into a rental. But he hadn’t pictured anything this rough.

  “Oh, dear,” Lily said. “That wood is going to start rotting if it isn’t painted soon.”

  “Needs a new roof, as well,” Garret noted grimly.

  “And the windows—why have they lined them with plastic?”

  “Probably for insulation. Though I imagine their heating bills are still high. There are a couple of cracks in that window over there.”

  “Poor children,” Lily murmured.

  Resolutely Garret made his way up the path to the front door. It hadn’t been shoveled, but footprints from the various family members had packed the snow down hard and smooth. He knocked.

  When no one came to the door, he knocked again. Someone was in there. He could hear the TV. Beside him, Lily looked concerned, but not afraid. He hoped he hadn’t made a mistake bringing her here. That what they were about to see wouldn’t be too hard.

 

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