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Chapter One
“Three! Two! One!” the crowd shouted in unison.
Standing by the Christmas tree in the center of the Midtown Village tiny-house community square, Pastor Eldon Kim pressed the big button on his hand-held remote. The lights on the twenty-foot tree sparkled in the cold November evening, the night after Thanksgiving Day.
On cue, residents flicked on their porch lights, and all their outdoor decorations came alive, brightly lighting up the rows of tiny houses around the square. The lights turned Midtown Village into its seasonal name of Christmas Village.
Cheers went up…but one heart sank to the ground.
Maggie Jacobs clapped as loudly as everyone else, her hands cold, and her smile masking the sadness and loneliness within. She zipped up her long goose-down coat and dug her hands into the insulated pockets.
Not alone per se, because she knew that God was with her, and her church friends were all around her.
But loneliness was a different thing.
A painful feeling of emotional isolation gripped her heart and there was no panacea. All she could do was leave this place andnever return. Her brother waited for her in Florida, and perhaps in his small community of Lakeside, she’d make new friends and find a partner in life.
But all was lost in Atlanta.
She looked around the Village and knew that the festivities would end in the first week of January when the two city blocks returned to their real name of Midtown Village. That would be one week after Maggie had packed up her worldly belongings and driven away.
Goodbye.
“Bittersweet” was the word she’d been experiencing all evening.
This was Maggie’s last Christmas in Midtown Village, at Midtown Chapel, and for that matter, in midtown Atlanta. She’d been there since Midtown Village used to be called Midtown Chapel Village, back in the early days of trial and error, when the first tiny home was constructed. Maggie had been in college then, excited about a new opportunity to minister to needy families by providing for them a roof over their heads and three meals a day.
In the distance, a siren blared, jarring her from her memories, reminding her of the big city she had lived in her whole life. Seven years ago, she’d stayed in town after earning her bachelor’s degree in communications, when Midtown Chapel hired her right away to be the ministry assistant to the pastor’s wife, Lydia Kim, who was the women’s ministry director at that time.
When Mrs. Kim had taken a break to care for her ailing mother, the church hired Tally Fitzpatrick—now Tally Moss—who kept Maggie in the same position.
In fact, Maggie and Tally had become friends in those five years they had worked together. If Maggie were to ever marry, she’d ask Tally to be her matron of honor.
Maggie sighed. She might be single for many years to come, if not her entire life.
After Tally had married and moved to the Bahamas, the position of women’s ministry director went back to the pastor’s wife. Mrs. Kim took the director position with the understanding that she would not manage Midtown Village.
The church spun off the tiny-house community into a nonprofit organization with new management. It even had a board of directors that was comprised of Midtown pastors and donors.
Since then, the new Village manager, Bina Marley, had gone through numerous administrative assistants. After firing the last one, she had taken months to find a new assistant she could work with. Every time Bina let someone go, Maggie had to do the work.
Maggie thanked God when the church finally hired Erika Song to fill in the administrative assistant position. Bina assigned her training to Maggie.
Once she finished training Erika, Maggie would only have one job left as the women’s ministry administrative assistant—half the workload she had been used to under Tally.
Maggie had been adjusting to the new changes. The work arrangement was not the same as when Tally had been the women’s ministry director.
Regardless of the changes in leadership, Maggie still loved working there. Truth be told, she didn’t want to move away from Midtown Chapel, her home church for life.
Still, that wasn’t why Maggie was leaving town.
She had to, though. She could no longer stay in Atlanta.
And the reason was ambling toward her, two mugs in his hands, cutting through the crowd with a smile on his face, under the street lamps and racing Christmas tree lights.
Levi Theroux, sporting a new beard he’d been trying to grow for months, handed her a mug. “Hot cocoa. No sugar. A couple of drops of honey. Just the way you like it.”
“You know me well.”
