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“I’m sorry, Hannah Naomi Rosenstein, are you missing work because your ex-boyfriend is in the same hotel as you?” Miriam was incredulous. “Nan, this isBlue. You’re going to be hiding for the rest of your life.”
She peeked out to glare at her tiny, paint-spattered cousin. “You know that I don’t like it when my plans get upended.”
Miriam laughed, folding herself into a chair by the fireplace. “I do know that about you, yes.”
“Well, I always planned that Blue and I would take over Carrigan’s together, but unfortunately while I was doing that, he was planning our great escape together, so it all exploded a bit.”
Noelle snorted. “A bit.”
Hannah stuck her tongue out but kept going. “Then I assumed I would inherit Carrigan’s myself—”
“Because you had been running the entire inn side of the business for several years,” Noelle supplied.
“Right, and because Cass explicitly told me I would. And then you came along, and you were the best farm manager in the world—”
“Were, past tense?” Noelle teased.
“Stop interrupting me when I’m trying to be honest about my feelings!” Hannah cried, and hit her best friend with a decorative pillow. “You were going to be my Blue, but better, because you’re, you know, not Levi. The two of us were going to usher in a Carrigan’s for a whole new generation.”
“And then I screwed everything up,” Miriam said, smiling.
“And then you made everything whole,” Hannah countered.
When Cass had left part of Carrigan’s to Miriam, it had been a surprise, but a perfect one. Miriam and Noelle fell in love, she and Hannah renewed their sisterhood, and she brought new business and new creativity to the Christmasland. The old Carrigan’s had been focused solely on Christmas-related business, not utilizing either the inn or the farm outside those few months, and business had been failing as the older, once-devoted guests had slowly stopped coming.
They’d taken a bold risk and launched Carrigan’s All Year to save the business they all loved—hosting all kinds of events year-round to bring in a new generation of guests. Now they hosted weddings and summer hikes and Purim carnivals, and everything in between.
She, Noelle, and Miriam had worked their asses off, and the past six months had been chaotic, with windfalls coming right as roofs fell in, all of them leapfrogging from potential catastrophe to potential income stream with no time to rest. It had been thrilling but also left her constantly feeling like she was on the knife’s edge of failure, about to lose everything she’d ever worked for.
“But we know all this,” Miriam said. “What does it have to do with Blue?”
“Well,” she continued, “we were finally starting to get our sea legs, and then here he is.”
“Hannah”—Miriam pointed at her—“youaskedhim to come back.”
Hannah scowled. “Only because we have legal business we need to take care of. He owns part ofourfarm, and I want it back.”
“I’m sure that’s totally the only reason,” Noelle grumbled.
Her friends were so mean to her.
Miriam sighed. “Okay, can I circle us back around to the key point that, even if he didn’t own the business, and even if you were totally over him, unless you’re planning to fire Mr. and Mrs. Matthews, kick them out of their rooms, and ban the twins, you’re never going to be rid of Levi Blue. Whether he wants to or not, he belongs to this place as much as you or any of us.”
“I would die before I fired the Matthewses,” Hannah objected.
“Obviously,” Miriam agreed.
Mr. and Mrs. Matthews were the closest thing she had to stable parents, her adoptive aunt and uncle, who—unlike her parents—always lived in the same place, knew where they were going to be tomorrow, and never made major life decisions on a whim.
Cass had been her lodestone, her greatest fan, her inspiration, but the Matthews family was her home, as much as anything was. Joshua and Esther, their twins, were the siblings she’d always wanted. Levi was something else. She knew she could never be rid of him. No amount of organizing, or planning, or arranging her life could excise Levi Blue Matthews. They’d known each other all their lives.
She didn’t know when she’d fallen in love, or when he had. They’d tried to trace their feelings back, and both had loved the other years before they’d ever admitted it. When Miriam had left them alone, Hannah and Levi had, without a buffer, with nothing to stop them from tumbling headfirst into certain disaster, done the only thing they could do—they’d fallen wildly, intensely, outrageously in love. They’d almost destroyed each other.
“Wait,” Hannah said, suddenly realizing something. “What the hell is he doing while we’re in here? Did you leave him to run loose in the inn?”
“I put him in the back cottage,” Noelle told her. “The one where we put guests we don’t actually want to talk to.”
This was true. It’s where they’d put Miriam’s former fiancée, Tara, last year, right before they broke up.
