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CHAPTER 1

NORA

The county recorder’s office opened at eight. I arrived fifteen minutes early because Griffin Cole had finally stopped being a rumor. Every plan I made while I waited ended with him owning my building and me needing a career that did not involve Christmas lights.

His name had floated through Holly Creek for weeks, the way the smell from Bellweather’s water-treatment plant had floated through town the week it went down. Depending on who whispered it, Griffin had bought one empty storefront, six buildings, or enough of Main Street to charge us for breathing. Nobody knew whether he had bought my building, so I had worried in a personal, rent-paying way and gone back to work.

Then, yesterday afternoon, the lights came on in the vacant storefront across from my shop. The building had been dark for four years. A sudden square of light was hard to miss, especially for a woman who considered unlit windows a personal insult. Curiosity won, so I crossed Main Street and looked through the glass. A man with dark hair and an expensive coat had spread blueprints across a folding table and weighted the corners with a coffee cup, a tape measure, and a rock from the sidewalk. The rumor had acquired shoulders. Unfortunately, they were broad enough to make the expensive coat look custom. A possible threat to my livelihood did not need to look that good in wool.

Last night, I went home and searched his name instead of sleeping. By the time I gave up at midnight, I’d found his LLC registration, his company website, and his structural engineering degree. Some people handled stress with yoga. I handled it with a search bar and enough coffee to make my left eye twitch. The internet told me who Griffin was. The county records would tell me what he owned.

At eight, I climbed out of my car with my cooling coffee and walked into the recorder’s office.

Betty Alvarez waved me toward the counter. “You look like you swallowed a lemon.”

“I’d like to see the Main Street commercial property transfers for the last ninety days.”

Her eyebrows went up. “Is this about the investor?”

I nodded.

“Main Street’s been losing businesses for years,” Betty said as she pulled the files. “Half the town thinks Griffin Cole is our last chance. The other half checked their leases the minute he arrived. Owen’s been talking about development at council meetings for months, but Griffin came with enough money to make it real.”

Owen Harper chaired the town council and had spent months begging someone to take a chance on Main Street. Apparently, he should have included terms and conditions.

The documents showed six cash sales, all completed between August and the end of September. The rumors had managed to get one thing right. Griffin Cole did not want one empty storefront. He wanted most of the block.

One of those sales included the building that housed my shop. I owned Winters Wonderland, but Portland Property Management owned the bricks and collected my rent. Five weeks ago, Portland Property Management had sold the building to Cole Development LLC, the company Griffin owned. I had a new landlord, and I hadn’t known it.

“The sale closed in late September,” Betty said. “The ownership notice was due within thirty days.”

The notice should have arrived by the end of October. Portland Property Management had sold the building but was still managing it for Cole Development during the transition. The only email it had sent me was yesterday’s message scheduling a roof inspection for Friday. It hadn’t mentioned the sale, Cole Development, or Griffin. Either I’d buried the ownership notice under the seasonal catalogs on my desk or someone had failed to send it. I preferred the second option because it made this somebody else’s fault.

Betty copied the six deeds and transfer records while I finished my coffee. I left with the copies tucked under my arm and headed back to Main Street.

Winters Wonderland opened at nine. I lived in the apartment above it, so before I left for the recorder’s office, I’d turned on the display lights and hung the OPEN AT NINE card inside the glass. It was eight forty-five when I got back, which gave me fifteen minutes to file the copies and become a woman who ran a business again.

At nine, I flipped the sign to OPEN. My regular carrier had left the ornament shipment beneath the awning at the back entrance while I was gone. I hauled the cartons inside, slit the tape, and got hit with enough cinnamon to season the whole block. One of the potpourri sachets had split in transit, which meant everything in that carton would smell like Christmas until Easter. The packing slip said Hal Sackett’s special-order cardinal was in the first box. I found it under three layers of tissue, moved it into one of my flat gift boxes, wrote HAL SACKETT across the lid, and tucked it beneath the counter. Then I called Hal to tell him his cardinal had arrived.

He came in just before ten, as he had every holiday season since before the shop was mine. He took his hat off inside, which nobody under seventy did anymore, and waited by the register while I lifted the cardinal from the box.

It was hand-blown and red as a stoplight, with a tail that caught the window light and threw it across the ceiling in a thin, bright stripe.

“That’s the one,” he said, as if he’d doubted me.

“That’s always the one.” I turned it over and wrote the year on the underside in gold pen. Hal had bought one red cardinal every Christmas since his wife died. Adele Fisk, the shop’s previous owner, had marked the first four. I’d marked the next seven. This one made twelve. “Twelve now.”

“Twelve.” He took the box in both hands. “She’d say I was being ridiculous.”

“She’d say it and then she’d hang it in the front.”

Hal laughed. I ran his card and set the box in a paper sack with tissue in the bottom. Neither of us mentioned that his hands were shaking. I didn’t think about the man across the street again until the bell gave one last jingle behind Hal. That might have been a personal best.

Pearl, my best friend and the owner of Sweet Provisions next door, came through the front door. “You okay?”

“There’s a developer. He bought this building.”

“The intense one with the dark hair?” Pearl set a box of pastries on my counter. “I saw him walking Main Street yesterday. Someone named Rosie came into the bakery asking about lease terms.”