Page 55 of Blood and Bells

Something passes over her face. Just once. Not well, not safely, and not in any way that improves my circumstances, but enough to tell me the words found their mark.

Then she shakes her head.

“I don’t know if I can trust you anymore,” she says.

There is no dramatic thunderclap. No heavenly choir. No poetic collapse of the porch roof. Just a simple sentence, spoken quietly by a woman in a winter doorway.

It is devastating.

“Holly,” I say, and hear the plea in it too late. “I am sorry. Not the polished version. Not the one that comes with an argument attached. I am actually sorry.”

She looks at me for a long moment, and I see the exact instant she chooses herself over the possibility of believing me.

Sensible and catastrophic.

Then she says, “I hope you get the tree back, Nick. I hope you save the festival. I hope you help fix all of it. But right now I don’t want you on my porch telling me that breaking your word was somehow for the greater good.”

I take a breath that feels lined with needles. “Give me a chance to fix this.”

Her hand tightens on the door.

“That’s just it,” she says. “You already had one.”

Then the door closes.

Not a slam. Holly is too precise for that. Just a firm, final click, the kind that says she has considered the matter and reached a conclusion I do not enjoy.

Snow begins again as I stand there, fine as sifted sugar, settling on the porch rail and the steps and my shoulders. It falls with the innocent industry of something that has never once broken a promise in its life.

I stay where I am for a moment longer, with my apology cooling uselessly in the air and no clever thing left to say to it.

Chapter Seventeen

The last thing I need right now is silence.

Silence leaves too much room for replaying things, and my brain has latched onto last night like it’s a terrier that’s got a personal vendetta and a trouser leg. Nick on my porch. Nick in his sitting room. Nick with dark on his mouth and excuses lined up behind his fangs, waiting for their cue.

I lasted exactly forty-three minutes alone in my house before deciding I’d done enough character building for one day.

Willow Creek has woken up and is already putting itself back together.

I cut past the playground on my way to The Knit and Kettle and catch just enough to register how much progress has been made. The fencing’s upright again. The slide has been persuaded to resemble a slide. The merry-go-round is no longer trying to reinvent itself as modern art. A cluster of volunteers is still at it, wrapped in scarves and grim determination as they negotiate with the aftermath of several hundred reindeer who clearly did not believe in civic planning.

The south fence will need checking later. Preferably by someone who isn’t me and is enthusiastic about fences. There are a dozen things still broken in this town. My phone hasn’t stopped buzzing all night. I’ve signed permits. Ordered lumber. Created groups and appointed team leaders. There are still a million things to be done.

Coffee comes first.

I push through the door of The Knit and Kettle, trailing cold air and a mood that could curdle dairy, with the bell above the door giving its usual cheerful little jingle as if I am not one frayed nerve away from strangling a decorative garland.

The place is warm, crowded, and smells aggressively of cinnamon. Someone has draped knitted snowflakes across the chalkboard menu. The big armchair in the corner is wearing a festive cushion cover, this one featuring a robin with the haunted expression of a bird that has seen too much. At the back, the espresso machine hisses—even the appliances are judging my choices.

Marcy is already here, of course. She is tucked into our usual table by the window with a mug the size of a soup tureen and the expression of a woman who knows she is about to receive an emotional unburdening disguised as gossip.

“Oh no,” she says. “That’s not your regular festival crisis face. That’s your ‘I have seen something deeply troubling and possibly extremely handsome’ face.”

I sink into the seat opposite her and peel off my gloves one finger at a time.

“You’re deeply annoying.”