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But she couldn’t blame her daughter for wanting her annual Christmas display of snowmen to be perfectly arranged. Growing up in Snow Hill does that to people. The whole town put so much thought and effort into their holiday decorations that it was impossible for even the youngest members of the community to avoid jumping on that cheerfully obsessive bandwagon.
Thankfully, Abby took one last longing look at her collection of more than a hundred tiny snowmen in various shapes, sizes, and styles. Then she let out the dejected sigh of all sighs and picked up her backpack. “Okay, but please don’t make me shower first.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it. Got your lunch?”
Robin’s nine-year-old spun around with a twirl of her plaid skirt to show that the superhero-themed lunch box was clipped to her matching backpack.
“Perfect. Let’s get going.”
The mother-daughter duo exited their three-bedroom historic home and were met with a blast of chilly November air. While many people thought Christmas decorations shouldn’t go up until after Thanksgiving, Snow Hill started sprinkling the town with holiday cheer on the first of November.
The famed town square—famous because Snow Hill was a popular destination for Christmas romance movies—was already dressed to the nines and ready for the hoards of tourists who would day trip to Snow Hill for a little holiday magic.
Robin and Abby strolled down the sidewalk toward Snow Hill Elementary, passing the Snow Hill Inn on their way. Neither of them could help but glance up at the beautiful yellow house with its white wraparound porch, trying to spot one of the Pattersons.
Robin had become fast friends with Holly Rhodes-Patterson, movie-star-turned-cooking-show-host, during her first Christmas in Snow Hill. Once she’d married Nick, thus cementing her as a resident of the town, she became the best friend Robin never knew she needed.
Sure, she’d had friends before Holly came along, but none of them gave her those warm-and-fuzzy, be-yourself-no-matter-what vibes that she read about in books or saw on TV. And after her husband was killed in the line of duty four years ago, most of those friends acted so strangely around her that it was impossible to avoid letting their friendships fall by the wayside.
Most of them were either police or firefighter wives, so the majority of their friendships involved hanging out with their husbands in a quadruple date situation. Truly, Robin imagined that was the real reason for the difference in their demeanor after Matthew died. None of them wanted to confront the reality that the same thing could happen to them.
None of them wanted to think about how they could be a happy family one second and a broken one the next. They couldn’t bear to be reminded that their husbands could go to work and not come home. It was a truth that was better left locked away in each of their hearts, and being around Robin only seemed to make them uncomfortable.
Robin didn’t blame her friends for distancing themselves. She’d like to think she wouldn’t have acted like that if the shoe had been on the other foot, but she knew it wasn’t a malicious mean-girl act of betrayal. It was self-preservation.
When they reached the school, Robin’s train of thought was interrupted by the relieving realization that they weren’t late thanks to Abby’s snowman display. Their close proximity to the three-story school building was one of the many reasons she and Matthew had fallen in love with their quaint house on the square, and today, it’d been incredibly handy.
She and Matthew had wanted at least three children and had imagined themselves walking them to school together before she went off to work at the mayor’s office and he headed to the police station, which was a short walk south. If their schedules had allowed for it, of course. But when you were newly married and dreaming of the future, practicality wasn’t really the most important thing.
“Have a great day, sweetheart,” Robin said, holding her daughter close and kissing the top of her head. “Love you.”
“Love you more,” Abby replied as she always did.
Even though it was their multiple-times-a-day routine, this time it made Robin’s heart pinch. After the dark turn her thoughts had taken on their short walk to school, hearing the familiar reply—one that Matthew had started with her and they’d continued together with Abby—only made tears fill her eyes as she watched Abby run to catch up with her friends. Sniffing loudly, she shook her head and turned in the direction of the mayor’s office.
But the second she walked in, her heart was stepped on once again.
Genevieve, the assistant mayor, stood in the center of the room brandishing a diamond the size of the moon on her left hand, while the other employees in their officeoohedandaahedover it.
“How did he do it?” Laura, the office’s new intern asked.
Genevieve put her right hand on her chest and sighed dramatically, staring down at the ring on her left. “It was the most romantic moment of my entire life.”
To avoid hearing the rest of the story, Robin pretended her phone was ringing and lifted it to her ear as she walked toward her office. Petty? Maybe. But the ruse didn’t matter much since everyone was so focused on Genevieve’s news that they hadn’t even seen her come in.
She was sure she’d hear the romantic tale eventually—it was a small town and the same stories tended to be repeated over and over again—so she didn’t feel too bad about ditching the scene for now. It’d been four years since she’d lost Matthew, so she wasn’t always like this, but there was something about this morning that had her feeling extra emotional and reminiscent. She wasn’t sure if she could handle listening to a proposal story after everything else that’d been on her mind today.
“Robin, you in there?” the mayor’s voice crackled through the intercom on her desk phone.
She pushed the button to respond. “Yes, just walked in.”
“Great, can you come in here when you get a second?”
Robin told him she would but shook her head with a grin as she did so. Mayor Andrew Thompson was a very kind husband and father of five, and he would never be the type of boss who made demands or treated his staff with anything other than kindness. But she knew when he asked her to do something “when she had a second,” he really meantnow.
She tucked her purse into the small cubby under her desk, shucked her jacket and scarf, and draped them both over her mahogany coat rack. Then she grabbed her tablet off the desk and headed for Andrew’s office.
“You rang?” she said as she entered through the open door.
