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“Closer,” she says.

Rafe moves his arm just enough that it’s behind me, not around me, his hand somewhere near the small of my back. Not touching. Almost.

“Smile, Rafferty.”

“I am smiling.”

“That’s not smiling. That’s your father’s face.”

And I laugh. I can’t help it. And he looks down at me, at the exact second I laugh.

“There,” his mom says, looking at it, very satisfied. “Perfect.”

She doesn’t show it to us. She just puts it in her pocket and goes to get more coffee.

I stand there by the tree and think: there’s a picture now. Of me. On Christmas morning. In somebody’s phone, in somebody’s house, in front of their tree. It’ll be on her camera roll between the tape and the cinnamon rolls. Next year, if she scrolls back, I’ll be there.

I’ve never been in a Christmas picture that wasn’t at my grandma’s kitchen table.

We sit back down. I end up on the couch. He ends up on the floor again, with his back against the couch, right in front of my legs, with the book open in his lap, reading it.

And after a while, without looking up, without saying anything, he leans his shoulder back against my knee.

I leave my knee there.

His dad reads. His mom sorts the wrapping paper into piles, saving the good pieces. The fire pops. The watch ticks on my wrist.

After lunch, when his dad goes to his study to take a call that he swears is the only one, and his mom lies down on the couch with a book, Rafe looks at me across the kitchen and nods at the back door.

I follow him outside where it’s cold and bright. The snow is perfect, deep and untouched, the kind that squeaks. I wear the scarf. I wear my coat and his mother’s old snow boots from the mudroom, which are a size too big, like her skates. He doesn’t wear a hat, and his ears go red in about a minute. I want to touch them and keep them warm. I don’t.

We walk around the side of the house, past the garages, to the old part. The yellow clapboard. The narrow back steps where he broke his wrist. The window that used to be his, with its wavy glass, and the stump under it where the maple was, a round white cap of snow.

We walk down the slope behind it, through the side yard, to the trees at the bottom where the creek is. It’s frozen. Not all the way. You can hear it under the ice, moving, quiet. He shows me where the neighborhood kids used to cross, on three flat stones, and where his mom used to stand on the back step with the bowl of freeze pops and yell for everybody to come up.

We stand at the edge of it for a while with our hands in our pockets and our breath going up.

“I’ve never had a Christmas like this,” I say.

He looks over at me.

“Good?” he says.

I look at him. His red ears. His hair. His hand in the pocket of his coat. The old house behind him at the top of the hill, yellow against all that white. I look at his mouth and feel my breath catch, so I look away.

“Yeah,” I answer. And then, because that isn’t enough, I add, “Really good.”

He nods. He doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t try to make it bigger or fix any of the Christmases before it. He just stands there next to me at the edge of the creek while I have my moment.

And there’s a word that comes up in me, standing there. A small one. I feel it in my mouth, but I swallow it down. I don’t say it.

We walk back up.

At four, I’m in the kitchen, helping his mom with the potatoes for dinner, peeling them into the sink while she does something to a roast that involves a lot of butter and a lot of rosemary. The radio’s on. Mr. Waleska is in the doorway, eating a carrot he took off the cutting board, getting told to stop eating the carrots.

My phone buzzes in my back pocket.

Rafe: Upstairs.