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“Okay, now you’re just messing with me.”

She smiled softly. “I did really have fun this week, though,” she said.

“So did I.”

“And you are my type,” she said.

“You’re my type too.”

Something sad flickered across her face. “I like you,” she said. “A lot.”

I had to swallow down the ache in my chest. “The feeling is mutual.”

And that was it. Because there was nothing else to say.

I’d never felt yearning before. Not really. But I felt it now. I felt it like I was grieving something old and mine and I had to let it go.

How was I going to go home tomorrow and not wonder what if for the rest of my life?

There’s nothing worse in the entire world than what if. It’s everything you’ve lost and everything you could have had, and the only limit is your imagination.

“Maybe we could have worked,” she whispered. “In another dimension.”

“Maybe we already did.”

We sat there, sharing a bed. So close our knees touched.

In another dimension, this is when I would beg her to reconsider. But in this dimension, I closed my eyes and went back to sleep. And I dreamed of me, banging on a glass wall, screaming at myself to wake up.

We slept a few more hours, took showers, and got back into our ugly sweaters just in time for Big Al’s call letting us know the sleigh was ready. We ran over and picked it up. The repair was flawless. We thanked him, sped back to Little Christmas, and dropped it off at the reindeer farm with minutes to spare.

It was already four o’clock. The wedding was at 4:30.

“Do you think we’ll make it?” she asked as we pulled out of the lot.

I looked at my watch. “Not if we want to go change. I can’t tell what’s worse, us not showing up or us showing up wearing the same ugly sweaters from yesterday.”

“Can they wait for us?” she asked.

“Not if they want to make it in time to ride the sleigh in the parade, which is basically the whole point of them getting married today.”

“William, I really don’t want to be in Noel’s wedding pictures with yeti eyeballs on my boobs.”

“They did say we could wear whatever we want.”

I got a laugh out of her, despite it all.

I nodded at her phone. “Call her. Ask her what she wants us to do.”

Lauren called while I drove toward town.

She hung up and looked at me bleakly. “She wants us to come as we are. They need to start on time.”

I rubbed my forehead. “They’re going to hang these wedding pictures in the town hall.”

She looked horrified. “What? Why?”

“Because Nick comes from a founding family? It’ll be considered a historic event.”