Christmas Is All Around

Chapter Twenty

CHAPTER TWENTY

In a charity shop the day after Boxing Day, Charlotte found the mask.

She was in the back of the shop, past the clothing, rummaging through the odds and ends—mismatched dishes, single candlestick holders, novelty mugs from long-ago vacations—when she spotted it, tucked almost behind a chipped vase. It was black velvet, studded with paste jewels. It was campy and dramatic and fun , and it would look spectacular with the black dress she’d stolen from Ava’s closet the week before, assuming that she had somewhere to be on New Year’s Eve.

Without thinking too hard about it, she bought the mask—it cost only three pounds, after all—and shoved it in her bag, then took it back to Ava’s flat, tossing it in her suitcase beneath a couple of sweaters, carefully out of sight. She felt far too aware of its presence, however, in the days that followed—as she spent time with Ava and Kit, lazing around in the weird liminal time between Christmas and New Year’s that she’d learned the Brits referred to as “Betwixtmas.” This involved a lot of sitting around the living room, trying to hold Alice without her screaming bloody murder as if she’d just been handed to a convicted criminal, and eating leftover mince pies, which Charlotte had decided were somehow disgusting and delicious at the same time.

During all that time, the mask haunted her with its presence, with its reminder of what she should have spent this week doing instead—namely, savoring every last moment with Graham, before her flight home on New Year’s Day.

Eloise had texted her on Boxing Day, just a simple message apologizing for complicating things between Charlotte and Graham. Charlotte could tell just from reading it how carefully it had been considered—there was none of Eloise’s usual breezy charm, but instead a cautiously worded apology, and then this:

Graham doesn’t know that I’m sending this, but you should know that he was very reluctant to do anything that would benefit Eden Priory if it involved asking anything of you. He’s the most honourable person I know, and I just want you to know that.

Charlotte had stared down at the message for a long time, despite the fact that it hadn’t contained anything out of the ordinary. One part of her brain argued that Eloise was just a sister trying to make up for accidentally having royally screwed up her brother’s love life, but another part, one that she was having a hard time ignoring, was very well aware of the fact that until Christmas Eve, Charlotte herself would have agreed with that final sentence from Eloise.

She hadn’t responded to the text—had let it sit on her phone for hours, glancing at it and then setting it aside, as she tried to work out how, exactly, to reply. The thing was, she liked Eloise. But she didn’t feel particularly warm toward someone who apparently had set her up to be used solely for her name and her temporary viral infamy. The whole thing left a bad taste in her mouth—like everything she’d left New York to try to escape had followed her here instead.

That evening, she FaceTimed Padma, who was staying with Andrew’s parents in Pennsylvania and apparently slowly dying of boredom, and explained the entire situation. She’d been attempting to keep her up-to-date via text, but finally sent her an SOS, feeling that a face-to-face session was required.

By the time she had finished talking her through everything, Padma’s expression was a combination of outrage mixed with… delight?

“Why do you look so happy?” Charlotte demanded, after a silence of several seconds had fallen, during which Padma seemed to be struggling to formulate a reply.

“I’m not happy,” Padma said hastily. “I’m full of righteous indignation on your behalf. I’m furious. I think we should burn Graham at the stake, on the grounds of his extremely large and historic country estate.” She didn’t even try to keep a wistful note from entering her voice at this last bit, and Charlotte knew immediately that she had lost her ally to that most ancient of lures: property.

“Padma, we don’t sympathize with rich English people who inherit houses,” she said sternly. “It’s in the Constitution somewhere.”

“Speak for yourself. I read a lot of romance novels, I’d be a complete hypocrite if I disliked Graham just because his ancestors were rich enough to build a big house.”

Charlotte wanted to take issue with this argument, since she was pretty sure that this line of reasoning would crumble under the slightest provocation, but she decided to keep her attention focused on more important things. “We don’t hate him because of the house,” she reminded her friend. “We hate him because he spent a whole month lying to me while also making me f—”

She broke off abruptly, alarmed at where that sentence had almost led.

On-screen, Padma had crossed her arms over her chest and was regarding her with a severe expression, which was extremely effective since she rarely deployed this weapon outside of work. “Charlotte Rose Lane. You are not going to run away from this problem using the same excuse you always use,” Padma said, her voice stern.

Charlotte crossed her arms in turn. “I don’t think that’s really fair, unless I’m forgetting another time that someone tried to cash in on my name and face without telling me, all while using sexual sorcery to ensure that I wouldn’t realize what was happening?”

“Sexual sorcery, is it?” Padma asked excitedly. “Does he take his glasses off?” she added, without missing a beat.

“I’m not answering that.”

“Aha!” Padma said triumphantly, pointing an accusatory finger at her through the screen. “Because you’re still secretly hoping to work things out! You wouldn’t care about spilling the beans if you never thought you’d sleep with him again!”

“That’s not true,” Charlotte protested. (It was, she feared, absolutely true.) “I’m just being… considerate.”

“Yes,” Padma said, nodding innocently. “You are always so considerate of your former paramours. The things I wish I didn’t know about the bedroom habits of a certain subset of millennial men of Manhattan and Brooklyn—”

“We’ve got to find you other books to read,” Charlotte muttered. “Paramours?”

“Andrew loves me for my vocabulary,” Padma said fondly. “And don’t change the subject!”

“ You changed the subject!” Charlotte howled.

“Stop arguing, and answer me this question: If Graham had told you his sister’s plan from the start, how would you have reacted?”

“I’d have understood and appreciated his maturity and honesty,” Charlotte said.

Padma made a sound like a game show buzzer on a wrong answer. “Try again.”

Charlotte sighed. “I would have been furious,” she admitted. “I wouldn’t have wanted to listen to his explanations. But ,” she added, holding up a hand before Padma could interrupt, “I think I would have eventually forgiven him, because I liked him so much.”

“Or,” Padma said thoughtfully, “you would have used it as an excuse to prevent anyone else from getting too close, just as you’ve done with everyone you’ve dated since Craig.”

“If I recall correctly, you were extremely supportive when I announced my no-relationships stance,” Charlotte objected.

“I’d had a lot of cocktails,” Padma pointed out, which was fair. “Also, it was one night of tipsy venting in a bar four years ago —I didn’t think you’d actually refuse to ever fall in love again, like, indefinitely.”

“That breakup sucked,” Charlotte said, shifting on her bed and trying not to dislodge the pillow she had her phone propped against. “Can you blame me?”

“Not all men are like Craig,” Padma said simply. “And not every guy you meet is going to be some asshole who thinks it’s cool and quirky to have an artist girlfriend from a famous family, and then bails the second you dare to have a moment when you actually need something from him and aren’t just a low-maintenance piece of arm candy that makes him look cool.” She paused, her eyes widening as her own words seemed to register. “Sorry. That was harsh… but, god, I hated that guy.”

“I know,” Charlotte said quietly. She knew Graham wasn’t anything like Craig—knew that she was letting her own fears, her own past, get in the way here. But…

“I just hate the thought that there was anything about Christmas, Truly that was responsible for us getting together.”

“Charlotte.” Padma gave her a look through the screen that was half affection, half exasperation. “It will never not be Christmas, Truly that got you guys together. His family owns Pip’s house! You’re doing a commission that includes a scene from the movie ! No matter what weird and sort of Machiavellian scheme his sister was cooking up, the movie always would have been part of the reason you guys started hanging out. Christmas, Truly is always going to be part of your story with him. Just like it’s always going to be part of your story.”

Charlotte was silent, feeling mildly stunned.

Because Padma was right.

“Of course I am,” Padma said patiently, when Charlotte told her this. “I’m always right. That’s why they pay me so much money.”

“No, they pay you so much money because you’re good at winning arguments.” Charlotte paused, frowning. “Have I just been lawyered? Are you actually wrong and just concealing it well?”

“No,” Padma said. “Because here’s the thing—and this is the last thing I’ll say about this, because Andrew is downstairs trying to teach his mom how to use TikTok, and I need to go intervene before something truly horrifying happens: I’m not trying to get you to forgive Graham for his sake. I’m doing it for yours .”

“What do you mean?” Charlotte asked, honestly befuddled, and Padma rolled her eyes, which was about as big a display of impatience as she ever offered.

“I want you to forgive him,” Padma explained, “because he messed up, and he apologized, and he’ll try to do better next time—and if he doesn’t, then you’ll know. But you’re falling in love with him—and you deserve another chance at that.”

“I—hmm.” This hadn’t been exactly what Charlotte was expecting from this FaceTime; Padma was, among her many other excellent qualities, a friend who was loyal to the point of implausibility—Charlotte was pretty sure she could commit a crime directly in front of her and have Padma still protest her innocence. She’d expected Padma to be firmly on her side in this Graham-versus-Charlotte situation. “Why are you taking his side?” she asked, trying not to let a plaintive note creep into her voice, feeling more than a bit pathetic.

“I’m not,” Padma said. “I’m taking your side, because I love you, and I want you to be happy. And I think Graham might make you happy.”

And Charlotte didn’t have any sort of reply to that—because she was pretty sure that Padma was right.

A couple of days later—the day after she bought the mask that she refused to think about, sitting in her suitcase—she saw Graham at the grocery store.

Her first thought was that he looked tired; he was wandering the aisles of Waitrose, a basket in hand, wearing jeans and a fisherman’s sweater with a hole in the sleeve, his glasses slightly askew, his hair rumpled. While he didn’t exactly look like a man who had vanished down a deep well of despair—which would have been extremely gratifying—he didn’t appear to be thriving.

He also stopped in his tracks when he saw her, then slowly advanced, like someone approaching an unfamiliar cat they were afraid would start hissing if they attempted to pet it.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hi,” she said, affecting an air of breezy unconcern that probably would have been more convincing if she hadn’t been wearing sweatpants and carrying a basket that currently contained only a bottle of merlot and a carton of the Cornish ice cream brand she’d become unfortunately obsessed with. She was acutely conscious of the fact that this seemed to practically scream, I am heartbroken and pathetic! , which was a message she generally went to great lengths to avoid conveying, but she was feeling, if not precisely heartbroken (or at least not that she would admit), at the very least extremely heart- bruised , and the fact that she had willingly left the house in sweatpants seemed to be all the evidence necessary in the “pathetic or not?” debate.

She was also feeling slightly terrified, because it had been four days since their argument on Christmas Eve, and she’d screened no fewer than five phone calls from him, and even more texts. Her conversations with Ava and Padma had given her a lot to think about—she’d lifted her phone to text him a number of times, and then set it down again, too nervous to follow through. Too unsure, still, of what she wanted to say to him. But now, the decision had been taken out of her hands, because here he was, with his rumpled hair and dark circles under his eyes, watching her with a combination of wariness and hope that made something in her chest ache.

“How have you been?” he asked, which was very polite but which she found extremely annoying because when, from the first moment of their very first meeting, had she and Graham ever been particularly polite to each other? To hear him now, attempting to exchange pleasantries with her in the grocery store like they were friendly neighbors, was depressing.

“Not great,” she said; the fact that she was wearing sweatpants and a pullover that Alice had drooled copiously on that morning made the truth of that reply abundantly clear. She suddenly wondered, somewhat wildly, when she’d last washed her hair, then decided that this simply was not a thing she was going to worry about right now.

After a moment of sudden, surprised silence, though, Graham did the most remarkable thing:

He smiled.

She’d forgotten how much she loved that smile.

“Me either,” he said, which Charlotte could tell, of course, but which it was still nice to hear confirmed. He took a step forward, and reached out a hand as if to extend it toward her, but then stopped, clearly realizing the mistake that this would be. “Lane—Charlotte—” he started, and then he stopped, looking at her almost helplessly, and she realized that this might be the first time she’d ever seen him struggle for words. “I’m so, so sorry. I was an idiot, and I just want you to know that I know it, and that I’m an ass, and that you deserve someone who wouldn’t try to use your name to sell a few extra tickets to a goddamn film screening. I know how much you didn’t want to risk getting hurt again, and I hurt you all the same, and I hate that—because you deserve better.”

But the thing, Charlotte realized in that instant, was that she did know this—in no small part because of him. Because he’d told her that, shown her that, over the past five weeks. He’d made a mistake… but he was human. And hadn’t she told him, more than once, that this was okay?

She stood there, silent for a long moment, failing to respond in a remotely socially acceptable way to anything he’d just said to her, because she was so floored by this realization.

While she was busy having minor epiphanies, however, he was apparently determined to say the rest of what he had to say—the reason he’d approached her in this grocery store. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, tapping at the screen for a moment before glancing back up at her.

“The last thing I need you to know,” he said, taking a step closer and dropping his voice a bit, making this entire conversation feel, suddenly, almost unbearably intimate, “is that, from the moment I met you, I wanted to know you for you . Not for any other reason.” He extended his phone, and Charlotte glanced down at the screen. It was a text exchange between him and Eloise, from a few weeks before. She quickly did some mental math—it would have been the day after they’d seen each other at Kew Gardens.

Eloise : you and charlotte looked cosy last night

Eloise :

Graham : Not taking any questions from you along those lines.

Eloise : don’t be boring. she seems nice!

Graham : She is.

Graham : Please don’t fuck this up, E.

Graham : I like her. So please, please do not say a single thing to her, ever about anything to do with Eden Priory, or the film. I don’t want her to ever feel like we’re using her.

Eloise : because you want to USE HER in other ways

Eloise : is this the first time you have EVER told me that you like someone?? jesus

Graham : Please.

Eloise : anything for young love!

Graham : I regret this conversation already.

Eloise : i can’t tell you how happy i am to hear it

She glanced up at him, not bothering to control whatever expression was on her face, and saw that he was watching her closely.

“It was never about Eden Priory, when it came to you and me,” he said in a low voice, his gaze locked with hers. “It was always more. And I thought you should know that.” He pocketed his phone again. “I’m heading back down to Hampshire tonight, to spend time with my mum and sisters. We’ve a lot to talk about, I think—and it’s because of you that I’m able to have those conversations, and if nothing else ever happens between us, I’ll always be so grateful to you for that.” He reached down to pick up his basket again, and then glanced back at her. “But if you’re around on New Year’s Eve… well, you’ll know where to find me. And there’s no one else I’d rather see that night—or ever again, I think.”

And, with that, he turned and walked away.