“Thank you, Melody,” Jenny said. “This place is magical.”
“Almost everything here was made locally,” Melody said proudly. “Our new shop manager wants it to be a place where people can come to purchase gifts from local artists and artisans.”
“What a great idea,” Jenny said, looking around. “I didn’t know that Trinity Falls had so many talented people.”
“We have long, cold winters here,” Melody said with a smile. “A lot of folks find themselves starting up new hobbies to pass the time.”
“Puzzles,” Gael chirped, darting across the shop to a selection of wooden puzzles.
“Enjoy,” Melody said to Jenny. “And let me know if you need anything. Good to see you, Erik.”
“So, you’re a regular here, huh?” she asked Erik with a smile as Melody headed back to the counter.
“I got all the decorations for the tree at the Center here,” he said. “And some of the gifts for the vets too.”
“You bought them all gifts?” Jenny asked.
“Nothing big,” he said, shrugging. “I just wanted everyone to have something to open.”
She nodded, too moved for a moment to say anything.
“Do you run on donations?” she asked him, wondering if there was anything she could do to help.
“We do accept donations,” he told her. “But wedon’t take in enough yet to run the place. That may come in time though.”
“So howdoyou run the place?” she asked him.
He swallowed hard and then turned to her.
“When I was serving, a couple of us who didn’t have anyone back home to send it to decided to invest most of our pay,” he said. “We took some risks, but in the end, we did really well, better than any of us expected. I guess it was a good time to be in the market. Anyway, I’m doing just fine now—enough to fund the Center.”
“Oh,” Jenny said, surprised. “It’s good that you can run it until donations pick up.”
“Even if they don’t,” he muttered. “We’ll still be fine.”
She blinked back her surprise. Running a center for as many veterans as he had here, paying for some of them to stay at the inn, buying Christmas gifts, and paying a full-time employee as well as covering his own living expensesindefinitelywas a little more than fine.
“I’m still the same man I was before,” he said firmly. “When we saw our numbers going up, everyone had a plan but me. A lot of the guys cashed out early, which was probably the smart thing to do. But I just let it ride, and I got really lucky. Now my only wish is that it won’t change me.”
Jenny nodded. That was understandable.
“Using the income from my investments for a good cause makes me feel better about having something I didn’t really earn,” he went on.
“Of course you earned it,” she said, shaking her head. “It all came from investing your own pay.”
“To be honest with you, the whole thing felt unreal,” he said, shaking his head. “It was all legal and proper, but watching the money grow that fast just felt kind of wrong to me. Paying it forward makes it feel right again.”
“That’s really nice,” she told him. “For the people you’re helping and also for you.”
“It’s a horse,” Gael said, heading over to them with a wooden puzzle in the shape of a horse cradled in his hands.
“That’s beautiful,” Jenny said, taking it when he held it out to her. “I can’t imagine how long it would take someone to make something like this.”
“Look at the decorations on that tree over there,” Gael said, pointing to a tree that seemed to be covered in tiny snow globes. “They’re really cool.”
“Let’s go see,” Jenny said, carefully setting the horse puzzle among the other wooden animals as they passed the table where Gael had found it.
Sure enough, the tree he was approachingwasdecorated with tiny snow globes. As she got closer, Jenny could see that each one had a different littlescene inside. There were little houses, animals, and even shops from the town.
