Christmas Is All Around

Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO

Please don’t complain,” Ava began, which was an absurd thing to be asked by a woman who had once gone into hysterics when her favorite eye cream had been discontinued.

Charlotte blinked up at her from her coffee mug. The tiny guest room in Kit and Ava’s flat was directly next to the nursery. This was hardly surprising, the realities of the London real estate market being what they were, but it did make for a less-than-ideal night’s sleep. She spared a passing, longing thought for her cozy apartment in Brooklyn, with the blue bedroom she’d painted herself, and the alcove nook she’d converted into a desk and studio space. It was the first place she’d ever lived alone, the refuge she’d created for herself after her last, terrible breakup. Until recently, Padma and her new husband, Andrew, had lived a couple of blocks away, their proximity more of a comfort than she’d fully realized, until they were gone. It was, admittedly, eye-wateringly expensive, but it was hers, and her bed was exactly the right firmness and her next-door neighbor was a divorced jewelry designer who threw fabulous dinner parties but, blessedly, had zero children.

“But Simone wants to go to visit some stately home out in the countryside this afternoon for their Christmas lights switch-on,” Ava continued.

Charlotte resisted the urge to groan by taking another large sip of coffee. It was Saturday, only three days after her arrival, and she’d already been subjected to a series of breathless monologues from Simone on the subject of the Christmas merriment that awaited them over the next month. Charlotte, who liked Kit’s parents but generally attempted to tone down her bluntness in their company, had done her best to nod politely and make noises of vague encouragement that went some way toward disguising her actual feelings on the matter.

She knew from previous visits to see Ava at the holidays that London was extremely enthusiastic about Christmas. But she lived in New York! All of Midtown Manhattan was a terrifying, glistening, Christmassy nightmare from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Eve, so it wasn’t as though she wasn’t used to it.

One thing that the English were inescapably, dementedly fond of, however, was the ceremonial switching-on of Christmas lights—and these festivities had been in full swing this week. Charlotte didn’t know if she had it in her to attend another such event, and was just beginning to attempt to formulate an excuse that she could offer for staying home instead, when Ava added this tantalizing detail:

“It’s at the house that belonged to Christian Calloway.”

Charlotte’s head shot up. “ The Christian Calloway?” Calloway was a Victorian-era artist who had been involved in the Arts and Crafts movement, and had been famous for his intricate prints, used on textiles and wallpapers.

“I don’t know how many others there are.” Ava winced at the sound of a squawk from the direction of the nursery. “ Kit! ” she hollered at a pitch that Charlotte personally thought should be illegal at eight fifteen on a Saturday morning. “Your offspring is awake!”

There was a thump, followed by some mumbled cursing from the living room, where Kit was attempting to wrestle a Christmas tree into a stand, Ava having awoken that morning determined that the tree move indoors from its spot in the back garden, where it had languished for two days since being acquired, no one being able to face the task of decorating with a maniacal baby.

“Coming!” Kit called back, and Ava poured hot water from the electric kettle over a tea bag in a mug, looking unconcerned.

“Didn’t Kit do all the feeds last night, too?” Charlotte asked, impressed by whatever witchcraft Ava had mastered to bend her husband to her will.

“Only because it’s a weekend,” Ava explained. “I do them on Sunday through Thursday nights, since he has to work weekdays and I don’t, at the moment. Or any days,” she added wryly. Ava had wrapped up her last show, at a theater in Richmond, when she was six months pregnant, and had not returned to acting since. Charlotte was uncertain how long of a maternity leave she planned, though she supposed that living in a country that didn’t expect mothers to waddle from the delivery room straight back to the office likely made the urge to return to work considerably less pressing. Plus, Kit was an architect—and if their flat, full of vintage furniture and expensive rugs, was anything to judge by, a successful one—so there was likely no urgency to Ava’s search for her next role.

“Anyway—Calloway. The house is called Eden Priory—it’s in Hampshire, outside some quaint little village.” Ava sighed happily, sipping her tea and completely ignoring the frankly horrifying screeching now emanating from the nursery and Kit’s attempts at singing some sort of soothing lullaby to calm the baby. “It should be a scenic drive. We can admire all the handsome farmers.”

“Please stop, I beg you,” Charlotte said. “You’re starting to sound like Mom.” Last year, while Charlotte and Ava were spending Christmas together, their mother was romancing an inappropriately young Spanish sailing instructor.

Ava scowled and pulled a box of muesli from the pantry. Charlotte rose to fix her own breakfast.

“Calloway,” she said dreamily as she poured some muesli into a bowl, then went to the fridge for yogurt. “Have you seen his wallpaper patterns? They’re incredible.”

Charlotte’s own artwork leaned heavily toward patterns and details—lots of twining vines and roses and the like; her bestselling print series ever had depicted various citrus fruits surrounded by cleverly arranged leaves and blossoms—and she’d always loved Calloway’s work, even though he had never been as famous as William Morris and some of the other leading artists of that movement.

She supposed that she could brave a bit of Christmas cheer for the sake of art . And, besides, an afternoon in the countryside would be a perfect excuse to ignore her phone, and the DMs she continued to be flooded with each time she checked Instagram. (She’d turned off notifications days ago, but the knowledge that the messages were piling in, regardless of whether she checked them every five minutes or not, was not soothing.)

All she wanted was a single afternoon in which she didn’t have to think about Christmas, Truly and her current status as a minor internet villain. And while a Christmas-themed activity wouldn’t have been her top choice, at this point… she’d take it.

The drive from London to Eden Priory was as scenic as Ava had promised; once they left the motorway, they traveled down a series of winding country lanes through a landscape of gently rolling green hills and bucolic villages. John was at the wheel, exclaiming in delight each time a new Christmas song came on the radio, and Charlotte kept her gaze fixed out the back seat window as they snaked their way through the village closest to Eden Priory—it was, ridiculously, called Upper Larkspur, and featured a tiny, two-platform train station, a couple of pubs, a few small shops, a church, and a number of thatched-roof cottages. Charlotte was not generally charmed by things that could be classified as “cute,” but even she recognized that this was, basically, the romantic ideal of a quaint English village.

Eden Priory itself was just outside the village proper, down a long driveway lined by thick clusters of trees forming a canopy overhead that must have been stunning in the summertime, though now, in late November, the branches were nearly bare. After a couple of minutes, however, the trees cleared and the house suddenly came into view, perched on a hillside they were now inching their way up, surrounded by woodland. There was an ornamental lake on one side of the house and, just at the edge of the woodland, a folly. The house itself was a romantically ramshackle stone building that looked as though it had been cobbled together over the course of several decades—or possibly a few centuries. As soon as she saw the house, however, Charlotte felt the strangest niggling at the edge of her mind, like she was seeing a vaguely familiar face that she couldn’t quite place.

“Does this look familiar to you?” she asked Ava in an undertone as they climbed out of the car with John, who was whistling cheerfully. A sectioned-off portion at the bottom of the lawn had been marked for parking, and they waited patiently as Kit and his mother emerged from the other car and attempted to extract Alice from her complicated-looking car seat.

“What do you mean?” Ava asked distractedly, holding out the baby carrier for Kit to wrestle Alice into, an ambitious operation that seemed to require both of their full attention.

“I don’t know,” Charlotte said, but quickly realized that Ava wasn’t listening. She frowned slightly as they approached the long gravel path leading up to the front door, wondering where she could possibly have previously seen this house. It sported a dramatic turret, rising above the gables of the roof. Where had she seen that turret before? Probably in some period drama about pale women who took long walks and the brooding men who loved them. Not her favorite genre of movie, but Padma adored them, and so Charlotte had watched her fair share. She pulled out her phone to take a photo to send Padma later.

They found themselves plunged into a cheerful flurry of activity as soon as they entered the front doors and paid the entrance fee to the smiling, albeit slightly harried-looking woman about Charlotte’s age who was running the front desk, dressed in a Victorian-era gown that Charlotte was almost certain was supposed to be a reference to something. There were hordes of people wandering around, a brass band offering renditions of Christmas carols in one corner, and a station selling mulled wine and mince pies set up along one wall. The room they found themselves in was enormous, featuring a soaring, timbered ceiling and a floor done in black-and-white tile that clicked satisfyingly under Charlotte’s heeled boots as she made her way through the crowds. A sign at the base of the staircase noted that Christian Calloway’s descendants still lived in the house, but that select rooms were open to the public with decor that had been preserved to offer visitors a glimpse into what the house would have looked like during Calloway’s lifetime. She turned in a slow circle, taking in her surroundings, and her gaze landed on the unlit Christmas tree occupying much of one wall.

She froze.

And suddenly realized, with unfortunate clarity, why this house looked so familiar.

There was a swear from behind her, and Charlotte realized that she’d stopped in her tracks so suddenly that Ava had nearly walked directly into her.

“What is wrong with you?” Ava asked, irritation creeping into her voice, though Charlotte charitably decided not to take offense at this, given that Ava was currently having her hair tugged by her spawn. Charlotte already knew from experience that Alice had an astonishingly firm grip.

“Oh my god,” Charlotte said, still not moving, staring ahead of her at the Christmas tree with something akin to horror. It was so obvious. The dark blue wallpaper. The worn, ancient-looking chaise directly to the right of the tree; the impressive marble fireplace beyond it. Even the ornamental china dogs that graced the mantel. Was this what post-traumatic flashbacks felt like?

“ What? ” Ava asked, more sharply this time. “Are you having a stroke?”

“I wish,” Charlotte said fervently, tearing her eyes from the scene before her at last and turning to face her sister. “Ava, this is the house where they filmed Pip’s scenes in Christmas, Truly .”

Pip had been the counterpart to Charlotte’s character, Tallulah; where she was the lonely daughter of a workaholic single dad on the Upper East Side who spent long evenings sitting in her bedroom window seat, writing letters to the English pen pal she’d been assigned through some sort of program at her elementary school, he was the lonely son of a single mother in a literal English manor, who alternated between staring wistfully out of his turret (she knew that turret looked familiar!) and sitting on a fabulous chaise by a large fireplace, writing letters by the light of the Christmas tree.

Ava blinked, then burst into laughter.

“Oh my god,” she cackled. “I promise I didn’t know.”

Charlotte shot her a filthy look.

“Very convincing,” she said darkly. “I really appreciate the empathy, by the way. Nice to rely on family.”

This sent Ava into another round of cackles, at which point Kit materialized, looking politely puzzled, and Ava managed to explain the situation to him, which set her off laughing yet again.

Kit squinted at the tree, and then his expression brightened.

“You’re right!” he said excitedly. “That’s right where Pip sits—there on that chaise, right by the fire!” He paused to look at Charlotte, entirely serious. “Do you think the dog that sat at his feet is still alive?”

“ Kit ,” Charlotte said, horrified by this betrayal.

“Probably not,” he conceded. “It was twenty years ago—that would be an incredibly healthy dog.”

“Maybe he gained immortality through the magic of Christmas,” Ava managed to get out before collapsing into giggles again.

“I thought you were my friend ,” Charlotte said to Kit, ignoring her sister entirely.

“Kit loves Christmas, Truly ,” Ava confided. “I’ve convinced him never to bring it up around you, but I guess it’s too late now.”

Kit shrugged apologetically. “I can’t help it,” he said earnestly, spreading his hands. “The scene where Pip finally moves to New York and into the brownstone next door to Tallulah, and he sets his stationery away in a desk drawer, because he won’t need it anymore…” He trailed off, his eyes going misty. “I don’t see how you don’t like it.”

“I don’t like any Christmas romances,” Charlotte said stonily.

Kit looked crestfallen. “But why ? Love and Christmas? My two favorite things!”

Ava gave her husband a sideways look. “Ahem. Aren’t Alice and I your two favorite things?”

“Two favorite people ,” Kit corrected. “An entirely different category.” He pressed a kiss to Ava’s temple, and she appeared mollified; Kit, meanwhile, looked back at Charlotte. “I know you were a bit traumatized by Christmas, Truly , but surely you don’t need to be prejudiced against the entire genre?”

“I do,” Charlotte insisted. “Because Christmas romances are bad . The meet-cutes under implausible circumstances! The elaborate festive tasks that require the protagonists to join forces and discover the joy of Christmas! The quirky, borderline-contrived Christmas rituals! The meddling supporting characters! The third-act fights! The sudden, improbable snowfalls! Kissing in front of Christmas trees! It is all terrible .”

Kit shook his head. “I think you just need to meet a handsome man from a small village whose family livelihood is tied to the festive season and who teaches you to view the holidays through new eyes,” he said solemnly. “You’ll be discovering the joy of Christmas in no time!”

“If that happens, please take it as a warning sign that I’ve suffered some sort of head injury,” Charlotte said darkly; at that moment, John and Simone reappeared, bearing an entire tray of mugs of mulled wine, one of which Charlotte seized eagerly, taking a hasty gulp and then immediately spitting a mouthful of scalding-hot wine into her mug.

“Jesus Christ,” she coughed, barely managing to avoid upending the entire mug.

“The steam rising from the surface is often viewed as a warning,” Ava said sweetly.

Charlotte shot her a look, then took another, more cautious sip. When she wasn’t burning the roof of her mouth off, it was delicious.

“Isn’t this nice?” Kit asked cheerfully; Charlotte had already realized, over the course of the past few days, that the Adeoyes’ enthusiasm for all things Christmassy must be some sort of genetic trait that they had passed down to their son, because Kit seemed genuinely delighted by every single decoration he spotted. In this instance, however, Charlotte had to grudgingly admit that he was correct: once she recovered from her initial horror at her unwitting visit to a hub of Christmas, Truly nostalgia, she could appreciate that their current surroundings held a certain degree of charm.

The soaring entrance hall in which they found themselves was a holiday wonderland: there was the Christmas tree—still unlit, of course, though not for long—and also the oak banisters bedecked with greenery; the (also currently unlit) fairy lights strung from the timbered ceiling; and the antique vases overflowing with sprigs of holly berries that were placed on nearly every available surface.

It was Christmassy without being cloying—and it was the latter quality that so often set her teeth on edge whenever she was being forced into some sort of holiday activity.

“Is something going to actually… happen? At some point?”

“What do you need to have happen?” Kit asked earnestly, sipping from his own mug of mulled wine with frank delight. He appeared to be a man entirely in his element: surrounded by his family, drinking mulled wine, and wearing a Christmas sweater featuring all eight reindeer. (Rudolph, notably, was absent, because Kit considered Rudolph to be a “corporate invention.”)

“Well, when are they going to switch on the tree?” Charlotte asked. “That’s why we’re all here, isn’t it?”

“They have to build to the moment,” Kit informed her earnestly; next to him, John nodded eagerly, and the resemblance between father and son was almost unsettling. “Also,” he added, more practically, “they wait until it’s fully dark—I don’t think the switch-on itself is until five thirty.”

Charlotte checked her phone and noted that it was only four. “How are they possibly going to keep us entertained for this long?” She glanced down at her mug of mulled wine and decided to carefully ration it.

A few seconds later, as if summoned by her words, there was a slight commotion at one end of the room, near the Christmas tree; the brass band had wrapped up their rendition of “Santa Baby” (which felt like an odd choice for their current setting, but Charlotte wasn’t the Christmas police), and a woman who looked to be about Simone’s age, dressed in a floor-length red dress and a snowy-white apron, stepped forward, clutching a mic.

“Hello, everyone! I’m Elaine Calloway… but for today, you may address me as Mrs. Claus!”

There was a great deal of enthusiastic applause in response to this.

“And this,” she said with a dramatic wave of the hand, “is—”

“Mrs. Cratchit,” said the woman who had taken Charlotte’s money at the entrance. She had a heap of messy dark hair that had been somewhat tamed into a braided knot at the back of her head, and at some point since Charlotte had last seen her, she appeared to have smudged flour on her cheeks for dramatic effect. “Naught but a humble housewife, suffering the effects of my husband’s employer’s greed.” She offered a lip wobble; Charlotte glanced sideways at Ava, who was watching this performance approvingly.

“And this ,” Mrs. Claus declared cheerfully, waving another hand, “is Cindy-Lou Who!”

Charlotte blinked as a girl who appeared to be in her early twenties appeared from behind the tree; her dark hair was a bit shorter than Charlotte’s, and she sported a blunt set of bangs, but the rest of her hair had been wrangled into two pigtails, and she was wearing a green shift dress. She looked unhappy about her current circumstances, and Charlotte couldn’t blame her. “Who will carve the roast beast?” she asked, scowling, and Mrs. Cratchit elbowed her in the side, presumably to encourage a better display of holiday cheer, which merely had the effect of causing Cindy-Lou’s scowl to deepen.

“We are delighted to welcome you to Eden Priory for the annual Christmas lights switch-on,” Mrs. Claus continued with a determined smile, “and this year, for the first time, we are thrilled to offer a complimentary photo opportunity for anyone who wishes to have their photograph taken with a famous Christmas character!”

She paused, beaming, and there was further appreciative applause; Charlotte suppressed a sigh.

“And it is not just us who are here to welcome you,” she continued cheerfully, “but a very special visitor that I’ve brought with me from the North Pole!”

“If Santa appears, I’m leaving,” Charlotte muttered to Ava, who hissed, “Shh!” Being shushed by Ava was somewhat galling in and of itself; as the far more melodramatic and attention-seeking of the Lane sisters, she had been known to monologue on a wide-ranging array of topics, despite Charlotte’s usually not-at-all-subtle attempts to get her sister to shut up and leave her in peace. However, it was particularly irritating now, when, prior to her conversion from normal human into mother, Ava had been perfectly happy to indulge Charlotte with a healthy bit of Christmas complaining.

“My husband, Father Christmas, is of course very busy this time of year,” Mrs. Claus said now, and Charlotte didn’t think she was imagining that the smile of Mrs. Cratchit became a bit strained at these words, “but he was good enough to send one of his helpers down to see you—yes,” she added dramatically, beaming at a small child who seemed to be actually quivering with anticipation at the front of the crowd, “it’s one of Santa’s reindeer !”

There was considerable oohing and aahing at this news, followed by a burst of applause when a reindeer—or, to be clear, a human in a felt reindeer suit—emerged from behind the Christmas tree. The quivering child seemed to actually be blinking back tears, though Charlotte was unclear on whether this was a positive reaction.

“Do you think they’re hiding anyone else behind that tree?” asked a guy standing in front of Charlotte to the man whose hand he was holding, who himself was wearing a pair of extremely bright green trousers.

“Maybe Pip from Christmas, Truly ,” Green Trousers Man muttered back, causing his boyfriend to clap a hand over his mouth to stop a laugh.

This, obviously, was Charlotte’s cue to make herself extremely scarce, lest anyone else have that godforsaken movie on the brain and happen to notice something familiar about her. She turned to Ava. “I’m going to poke around upstairs,” she murmured in her sister’s ear, and Ava nodded distractedly, her attention still focused on the events at the front of the room. Charlotte was experiencing extreme secondhand embarrassment on the part of everyone involved, so it was a relief to slip out of the crowd and slowly climb the stairs. She half expected the next floor to be blocked off, but it wasn’t; some of the rooms had signs on the closed doors marking them as private, but there were several with open doors that she wandered through; these were all decorated in period style—wallpaper, lavish rugs, worn-but-elegant furniture—and featured a number of pieces of Christian Calloway’s art in frames on the wall, including plenty of sketches and unfinished works that Charlotte had never seen before. She occupied herself reading the informational placards in each room that explained how the house had been used during Calloway’s lifetime; he’d apparently inherited the house from his father, as he’d been born into family money, but had undertaken extensive renovations following the success of his home furnishings company in the late nineteenth century.

She was so caught up in her self-guided tour that she wasn’t sure how much time had passed when she realized that she was not alone. She stepped back, having been immersed in a lengthy placard about the contents of Calloway’s library, to find a woman a bit older than her with curly blonde hair and glasses watching her with an avid expression.

“Holy fuck,” she muttered under her breath, and then immediately clapped a hand over her mouth. “Sorry! Sorry! That’s 50p to the swear jar!”

Charlotte blinked. “The… swear jar?”

The woman nodded fervently. “My husband told me I swear too much—I’m a pediatric nurse, and I keep swearing in front of the kids—and I’m trying to work on it, so I’m charging myself 50p each time I swear.”

“Well,” Charlotte said warily, “I’m sure an occasional slip of the tongue—”

“But holy shit . You’re her .”

Oh, dear god. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, plastering a polite smile on her face (not a thing she excelled at, generally) and slowly inching away from the woman.

“You’re Charlie Rose Lane. From Christmas, Truly !”

“I don’t think—”

“No, I saw you downstairs and thought I recognized you from your Instagram, and I was right!” the woman said triumphantly, and Charlotte sighed. She’d been meaning to replace her profile picture with a sketch she’d done of herself instead, and this was clear proof that this step was overdue. The woman’s expression darkened. “And I read that article about you, you know. Did you really ruin the entire reboot?”

“I don’t act anymore,” Charlotte said diplomatically. “ Christmas, Truly was a sort of… one-off for me.”

“You could have made it a two-off,” the woman said dejectedly; she seemed to be lapsing into sadness rather than anger, which made Charlotte possibly even more uncomfortable. She didn’t handle feelings well—hers or anyone else’s. The woman’s expression brightened after a moment. “But wait a second—what are you doing here? Revisiting it for old times’ sake? Any chance we can change your mind?” She moved toward Charlotte eagerly, and Charlotte continued to resolutely inch backward, praying that she didn’t accidentally topple a priceless vase in the process.

“I don’t think so,” she said, smiling as politely as she could manage under the circumstances. “I need to go find my family, though, so it’s been nice—”

“Oi! What are you doing here?!” Ordinarily, this interruption would have been alarming, but at the moment, to Charlotte’s desperate ears, it sounded like a chorus of angels. She whirled around to see one of the trumpeters eyeing them suspiciously.

“Just leaving, actually,” she said breezily, flashing him a winning smile; he looked to be about seventy, and appeared momentarily dazzled, which was why she deployed her brightest smile only on carefully selected occasions. Charlie Rose Lane had smiled a lot , and Charlotte had lost her taste for it.

“They told us no one was supposed to come up here except staff while the event was on,” the trumpeter continued, recovering enough from her smile to look suspicious.

“Well,” Charlotte said, a bit shortly, “perhaps they should have put up a sign or roped it off or something, rather than just assuming that I would miraculously divine that I wasn’t supposed to be here.”

The trumpeter frowned. The foulmouthed blonde woman frowned.

“I don’t think Tallulah would have ever said anything like that,” she said reproachfully.

“Because Tallulah wasn’t real,” Charlotte said curtly, and then turned and made her exit, ignoring the muffled profanity and unimpressed tutting behind her.

Once she made it downstairs, she paused to take a breath before plunging back into the madness; the crowds appeared to have split into various groups, with a lengthy, very noisy queue heavily dominated by young families stretching along the wall away from the fireplace, waiting to take photos with the costumed character of their choosing. Charlotte squinted and saw that Ava and Kit were standing in this line, Alice strapped to Ava’s chest and scowling heavily at everyone around her. The brass band seemed to be preparing to launch into another set, and there were a number of people lined up for mince pies and mulled wine. John and Simone were nowhere in sight, but Charlotte gathered from the snippets of conversation she overheard that there were different activities in some of the rooms branching off from the main hall, and she assumed that was where they’d vanished to.

She hovered uneasily at the base of the staircase, finding the idea of plunging back into the crowds before her extremely unappealing; she also felt strangely visible after her encounter with the woman upstairs, though she knew that the internet was a strange, fragmented place, and that the viral article that had caused so much recent havoc in her life had probably gone entirely unnoticed by the vast majority of the population.

However, knowing that on a logical, academic level and making her body believe it were two different things entirely, and she thought she’d feel more at ease if she could just squirrel herself away in a corner until it was time to go home. She wound her way through the throngs of people, many of whom were looking distinctly rosy-cheeked (presumably from the mulled wine; it wasn’t actually that cold outside), aside from the parents of young children, who looked distinctly harried (as so often seemed to be the case).

She turned, scanning the room in search of somewhere a bit more private, before realizing that there was an alcove hidden away, almost out of sight, beneath the staircase she’d just descended. She darted across the room, and a quick glimpse within showed that it contained nothing except a single bench; a hallway led in one direction and vanished around a corner, and Charlotte presumed this had been designed as some sort of shortcut to be used by servants in the house’s earlier years. She sank down onto the bench gratefully.

Glancing through the doorway she’d just passed through, she realized that this angle afforded her a good view of the room beyond, and particularly the Christmas tree. Without fully realizing what she was doing, she reached into her bag for the sketchbook and pouch of drawing pencils she always carried with her, just in case.

Her eyes fixed on the Christmas tree, Charlotte began to sketch. She drew quickly, in broad, loose strokes; she could feel her shoulders relaxing as she did so, and she slipped into the almost trancelike state that always seemed to descend upon her the second she put a pencil to paper. She wasn’t thinking about the weeks of forced Christmas cheer that awaited her; she wasn’t thinking about the fact that her parents hadn’t even thought to tell her that they had (once again) reconciled; she wasn’t thinking about the hordes of angry DMs that glared at her from her inbox every time she opened Instagram. She thought about nothing except the scrape of her pencil against paper, the weight of it in her hand, and the vision slowly forming on the page in front of her. She was so immersed that it took several seconds for the chanting to creep into her consciousness; by the time she registered what was happening, they were down to “… four, three, two, one!” and then, instantly, the tree she was staring at was ablaze with light.

And it was…

It was just a Christmas tree , for god’s sake, she thought irritably, listening to first the dramatic, collective indrawn breath, then the chorus of “oooooh,” and then the thunderous round of applause. You would think that none of these people had ever seen a Christmas tree before. It was one thing for the children, who hadn’t yet been jaded by too many years of bad Christmas movies and alarming January credit card bills. But for fully grown adults to stand there gaping at a fir tree bedecked with string lights, orange slices, and some admittedly lovely, vintage-looking glass ornaments—well, it was honestly ridiculous.

And yet, here she was, sketching it. And in spite of herself, she was already picturing how it would look in watercolors, with the white lights shining like stars against the darker green paint of the fir needles. The dark blue of the wallpaper would be a perfect backdrop; indeed, the moody hues of the room overall gave the tree and its surroundings a sort of classic, secular wintry vibe, one that she appreciated considerably more than multicolored lights and ornaments featuring Baby’s First Handprint. (Better, however, than the ones her mom had had made, featuring Ava’s and Charlotte’s first teeth!)

She worked herself into enough of a huff that she very nearly poked a hole through the page in her sketchbook, when—quite suddenly—there was a man standing in front of her. And he had the audacity to look irritated , of all things.

He was also, she registered after a moment… part reindeer? He had a reindeer body with a human head?

“What the hell?” she wondered, not convinced she wasn’t hallucinating, and also wondering if the mulled wine had been spiked with something stronger. And then, mercifully, her brain caught up to her eyes, and she realized he was the person inside the reindeer costume she’d seen earlier—he’d just removed the headpiece, which he was currently carrying under his arm, like some sort of weird hunting trophy.

“What the hell?” he echoed, sounding extremely English and vaguely annoyed.

“Can I help you?” she asked, a bit coolly.

The man raised an eyebrow at her. “Good afternoon to you too.” The combination of an English accent, a deep voice, and the vaguely old-fashioned greeting made her fairly certain that, were Padma here in her place, she would actually combust on the spot.

Not to mention, Charlotte noted entirely unwillingly, the fact that he was dark-haired and wearing horn-rimmed glasses. (Charlotte had an extremely unfortunate weakness for bespectacled men.) And now, suddenly, he appeared to be… stripping?

“Um, hello?” She dropped her pencil and waved a hand. “I’m sitting here? Maybe find a bathroom?”

“I promise there will be no inappropriate nudity that might offend your delicate eyes,” he said shortly, which did nothing to convince Charlotte that he wasn’t a time traveler from the nineteenth century.

“Is there not anywhere else you can do this?” she asked. “I’m trying to hide.”

He laughed under his breath as he wriggled out of his reindeer suit; it was basically impossible to look dignified while doing this, but he somehow managed it, particularly once it was revealed that he was wearing an oxford shirt and plaid trousers underneath.

“I wish that I could hide right now,” he muttered, not entirely to her, and it was her turn to raise a brow.

“Did someone force you into that reindeer suit at gunpoint?” she asked. “Is this a hostage situation?”

“Pretty much,” he confirmed, doing his best to fold the reindeer suit neatly, though it was definitely not a garment that lent itself to retail-quality folding. He set it down next to Charlotte on the bench and then, disturbingly, rested the head atop it. He stepped back and looked at Charlotte somewhat expectantly.

“Can I help you with something?” she asked, glancing down at her half-finished sketch longingly.

“I wonder if I should be asking you that question,” he said slowly, something like amusement hinted at in the corners of his mouth. This, naturally, did not endear him to her. “You seem a bit… distressed.”

“I’m not distressed ,” she objected, then paused to consider. “Actually, if I decided to channel a BBC drama and tell you that I was distressed, would you leave me alone?”

“Have we met before?”

“That seems highly unlikely.”

“It’s just that usually I make a decent enough first impression that people wait until our second meeting before being this annoyed by me.” He adopted a wounded look. “Are you biased against reindeer?”

“You caught me,” she said, deadpan. “I took one of those implicit bias tests, and my reindeer prejudice was off the charts.” She sighed. “Sorry. I was avoiding the crowds, and you crashed my hiding spot.”

“ Your hiding spot,” he repeated, his mouth doing that maybe-amused curving at the corners again, though she didn’t understand why at the moment.

“I was here first. I think that makes it mine.”

“Does it?” He was glancing back over his shoulder, distracted, as he spoke; the brass band, which had struck up another rousing round of Christmas carols upon the lighting of the tree, seemed to at last be winding down, and she wondered vaguely how much time had passed since she’d secreted herself into this nook—she tended to lose track of time when she was working. “I was looking for somewhere to catch my breath for a few minutes, but since you’re already here, I suppose I’ll go elsewhere.”

“Don’t bother,” she said with a sigh, standing up and sliding her sketchbook into her bag. The clamor of voices beyond the room began to be the sort that signaled the end of an event. “I need to go find my family—somehow,” she added wryly, watching a large crowd cluster at the door, trying to exit. She pulled her phone from her dress pocket, thinking it might be easier to text Ava to find out where she was at the moment, but her hideout-crasher waved a dismissive hand.

“Don’t bother. Mobile signal is abysmal in the house. Old buildings, you know?”

“I’m from America, where our idea of ‘old’ is about thirty years ago, so no, I don’t know. Doesn’t the family still live here? How do they get by without cell signal?”

“A landline, and very good Wi-Fi.”

“Have you met them?” she asked curiously, wondering what it would be like to live in a historic house that had been passed through the same family for generations.

He nodded. “I grew up around here.”

“Don’t tell me,” she said, pressing her finger to her chin in thought. “You were the alleged son of the vicar, but in actuality the natural son of the gentleman of the house—he paid for you to go to Oxford so that you might make something of yourself, even though he couldn’t acknowledge you as his own.”

“I didn’t go to Oxford.”

“But the rest is true?”

“Er. No. Do you read a lot of novels?”

“No,” Charlotte said frankly; she listened to a lot of nonfiction audiobooks when she was working, but read novels far more sparingly. “But my best friend does. She has raised my expectations for what sort of characters I might run into in an English stately home.”

“Fascinating,” he murmured, extracting his own phone from his pocket. Before Charlotte could ask precisely how well he knew the family—well enough to have been entrusted with the Wi-Fi password, clearly, as he was tapping away with a furrowed brow—he glanced up at her, his brown eyes clearing at the sight of her. “Sorry, that was rude,” he said, “but I unfortunately need to go find someone.”

“I’m leaving anyway,” she repeated, rather than think about any of this too hard. She gave a shallow, extremely wobbly curtsey. “Good evening, my lord.”

And then, feeling quite pleased with herself, she swept past him.

Once she emerged from her nook, however, a quick scan of the room didn’t reveal her family anywhere in sight. She weaved through the gradually dispersing crowd, searching for them, but they were nowhere to be found, and after a few minutes she found herself standing in the same spot again, puzzled, as the last trickle of visitors made their way out the front door. Maybe they were waiting for her at the car? She glanced down at her phone but saw that the handsome reindeer man had been correct: she had no signal. She slipped on her coat and made for the enormous oak front door, neatly sidestepping Cindy-Lou Who, who was carrying an enormous bucket full of dirty dishes.

Surely they’d be waiting for her at the car. Because it wasn’t like her entire family would abandon her at a manor house in the English countryside… right?