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I pick it up and hear Aaron groan as I carefully remove the tape to reveal a simple white box inside. I open it. Inside is what looks like yet another white box, but as I pull it out, I realize it’s a Chinese takeout food container.

“Aw, man. Who regifted?” Mackenzie asks.

When Aaron starts to laugh, Mackenzie balls up a wad of wrapping paper and throws it at him.

Aaron bats it away. “No regifting is not an official rule. Also, I told her to take the candle. Also, I’m willing to tradesies if I can keep the Kit Kat.”

I open the container, and inside is yet another Chinese takeout container, but this one is on a string. It’s made of a ceramic material to look just like the one it was packaged in. There’s a thin, red satin ribbon looped through one of the handles. As I pick it up, it begins to spin, then stops to display the year 2024.

My lungs constrict, and my heart begins to thump so strongly it feels like it’s shaking my entire chest.

It’s a Christmas ornament.

From 2024.

The missing piece of my collection.

“It’s perfect,” I whisper to no one in particular. It’s a reminder of the fact that neither Larry nor I cooked and how I used to sneak him takeout food when the hospital food sucked or when I got home too late and too tired to pull something together. Most of my memories of 2024 are not good ones. They are sharp and painful to touch, but also my last ones with Larry.

I hug it to my chest.

“Well,” says Nancy, not realizing the full extent of what just happened but maybe sensing on some level that it was meaningful, “shall we get cleaned up? We have more eating to do today.”

• • •

And we really eat.

An entire turkey dinner in the middle of the afternoon. Then a constant stream of sugar and pastry until seven o’clock, when we head to Mackenzie’s cousin Zoe’s house for her annual Christmas party. She serves lasagna, which I skip, and eggnog, which I also skip, and the most delicious butter tarts, of which I have three.

When we get back to the house just after midnight, I feel like I’m going to burst, both literally from food and figuratively from forty-eight straight hours of Christmas-induced serotonin.

Mackenzie walks me to the house’s front door but pauses on the porch outside. “I think maybe I should sleep out in the loft tonight,” he says.

The inside of the house is dark except for a single light left on in the entranceway. I suspect Mackenzie’s parents are fast asleep in bed, but I was also going to suggest the same. “There are no reindeer to take the fall for us tonight.”

He laughs and leans in to kiss me, but stops as a flash of light shoots across the sky.

“Shooting star,” he says, pointing. “Make a—” He pauses mid-sentence, leaving the rest unfinished. “Sorry, I forgot. Not your thing.”

But tonight, I wonder if it is. I am standing on the front porch of a house that feels like it was plucked off the front of a Christmas card next to a man who is kind and funny and more handsome than anyone has a right to be. I’m full of turkey and chocolate, and I’m happy—and for the first time in a very long time, my heart doesn’t ache every time I breathe.

For so long, I thought feeling like this would be impossible, and now I wonder if maybe I was wrong and this is what they mean when they say the magic of the season.

I close my eyes, and for the first time in a very long time, I make a wish. When I open them again, he is looking at me.

“Annalise Harris, did you just wish on a shooting star?”

I don’t answer, but I do smile.

He shakes his head. “That’s a gateway to big stuff. Next, you’re going to be telling me you believe in Santa or soulmates.”

I make a show of rolling my eyes. “Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves.”

He leans in, bringing his face close to mine. “God, I love you,” he says.

My entire body goes rigid, because that was a big word, and I’m not sure he meant to throw it out there like that. However, now it hangs between us as if it’s waiting for its match. It’s reciprocal: I love you, too.

“It’s okay,” he says, brushing frozen bangs from my forehead. “You don’t have to say it. I sprung that on you. It was the right moment for me, but I know you like time to process.”