Christmas at Clover Hill Bonus Chapter

Five Years Later

Christmas Eve at the Estate

The snow started around three.

Holly watched it come down through the kitchen window of the house — their house, three years in now, the one they’d bought together in the spring of the first year and moved into a room at a time, because that was how Nate did things. Carefully. Without rushing. The house was on the north side of town, set back from the road, with a long driveway that wound through the sugar maples. It had been nobody’s house before it was theirs, which was the point. It wasn’t Nate’s house with Natalie’s kitchen in it. It wasn’t Holly’s cottage on Birch with Hazel’s reading seat in the window. It was the house they’d chosen together, and they’d brought everything they loved into it, and when Holly stood in the front hall now she didn’t feel like she was visiting anyone. She felt like she was home.

The photos were on the mantel in the living room.

Natalie at twenty-six, laughing into the camera in a summer dress, at a lake in New Hampshire — Nate had taken the picture himself. Owen holding a two-year-old Hazel up against his chest in the backyard of the house they’d sold, the sun in his eyes, his whole face open. Natalie with Emma’s newborn fingers wrapped around her thumb. Owen in the studio in the old house, leaning in the doorway with a cup of coffee, watching Holly paint.

They were always there. The girls knew every one of them. Emma had put the lake one up herself last year when they were rearranging the mantel for Christmas and had looked at Holly and said, Mom liked the green dress, right? and Holly had said, Yeah, she did, Em, and Emma had nodded and moved on with the garland, and Nate had come in from the kitchen with a dish towel over his shoulder and had caught Holly’s eye and given her the small private smile.

They called her Mom now, both of them. Emma had started first — the winter they got engaged, on a Tuesday afternoon at the kitchen table, between bites of grilled cheese, like she’d been working up to it and decided today was the day. Holly had said what’s up, Em and hadn’t looked up from her grocery list, and the Mom had slid in quietly, and Holly had made it all the way to the front porch before she sat down on the step and cried.

Hazel called Nate Dad. She’d started about a week after the wedding. Nate had gone quieter than usual for three days afterward, and finally on a Saturday Holly had found him in his garage with sawdust on his sweatshirt and cold coffee on the workbench. He’d said, without looking up from the joint he was sanding, I don’t want to mess it up. Holly had leaned against the doorframe and watched him work and said, You already haven’t.

Both girls were upstairs now. Thirteen now — Hazel in August, Emma in November, one hundred and six days apart, as Hazel liked to point out — and the thirteen-ness of them was starting to show in ways that made Holly’s chest ache. Hazel was taller than her. By half an inch. Holly had measured them both against the kitchen doorframe last week and Hazel had put her hands on her hips and said, I win, and Emma had said, Only for now, and then they’d both gone back upstairs to whatever thirteen-year-olds did in their shared bedroom when the grown-ups weren’t listening.

“Holly.”

Nate was in the doorway. He had his coat on. He was holding hers.

“I was woolgathering.”

“I noticed.” He handed her the coat. “Sophie just texted. She said if we aren’t there in twenty minutes she’s coming to get us personally, and she has a look.”

“The girls?”

“In the car already. Emma put her coat on fifteen minutes ago just to make a point.”

Holly smiled and pulled her coat on. Princess was at her feet — slower than she used to be, gray coming in around her muzzle, nine years old now and built for comfort in her old age — and she followed Holly to the front door the way she followed Holly everywhere, stationed and silent.

“You too, old lady,” Holly said, and clipped the leash to Princess’s collar, and the five of them walked out into the snow.

The Estate looked the way it always looked on Christmas Eve — like a photograph somebody had composed on purpose.

Sophie had been hosting Christmas Eve at the Estate for — Holly counted — six years now. The first year had been smaller. Sophie and Daniel and Ellie and Ben and Cole and Piper, and Jim and Linda, and Hazel and Emma, and Holly and Nate — who had not yet been Holly-and-Nate, not quite, not the way they were now. That was the night it had happened. In the gazebo. In the snow. His hands on the sides of her face and the world stopped turning for a second and then started again, differently. Holly could still walk the steps of that night in her head — the dish she’d brought, the sweater she’d worn, the exact pitch of Linda’s laugh from the other side of the room when Jim said something dry about the cranberries, the way Nate had followed her out to the gazebo and shared his heart. Every year since, the party had grown — kids arriving, kids getting bigger, babies carried in car seats and then toddling and then running full-tilt through the house — and Sophie had kept up with every round of expansion because Sophie was Sophie. She’d added a table. She’d added another table. Last year she’d moved the whole thing into the ballroom because the dining room had stopped being able to contain it.

Tonight, as Holly came up the long drive, the house was glowing from inside the way only Sophie’s house glowed on Christmas Eve. Every window bright. The wreath on the front door was fresh cedar and winterberry and the red-ribboned pinecones Sophie made herself and refused to talk about. The gas lanterns along the walkway were lit. There was a snowman in the front yard, clearly the work of small children under the supervision of a larger child, because the snowman had four buttons instead of three and one eye was higher than the other.

Holly loved that snowman.

Nate parked behind Cole’s truck. The girls were out before the engine was off, Hazel with her hand already on the door handle, Emma saying wait for reasons only Emma knew — probably because she’d seen something through the window and wanted to confirm Hazel saw it too — and then they both bolted across the snow toward the front porch, coats unzipped, scarves trailing, thirteen-year-olds still running full-tilt through the snow like six-year-olds.

“They’re going to knock somebody over,” Nate said, getting out.

“They always do.”

“Sophie forgives them.”

“Sophie forgives them. Last year she was personally offended by Ben tracking snow in.”

“Ben’s not thirteen.”

“Ben should be more careful.”

Nate laughed once, quiet, and came around the car and took Holly’s hand without saying anything about it, and they walked up the lantern-lit path to the door together, unhurried.

Sophie opened the door before they knocked.

“Finally.” She had an apron over a dark green dress and her hair up in a knot that was almost, but not quite, perfectly neat, and she was holding a wooden spoon with cranberry on it. She kissed Holly’s cheek. Then she kissed Nate’s. “The girls went straight to the tree. Emma’s not sure about the angel.”

“She always has opinions about the angel.”

“I know. I love her for it. Come in.”

They came in.

The house was — Holly searched for the word and gave up. The house was Sophie’s house on Christmas Eve, and the house on Christmas Eve was a whole thing you couldn’t break into parts. Cedar garland on the banister. Candles on every surface Sophie could defend from a two-year-old. The tree was in the great room, tall enough to brush the ceiling, hung with ornaments Sophie had been collecting since she was twenty-three and ordering them by color and size on a system she’d once tried to explain to Holly and had given up on halfway through. The whole house smelled like cloves and cinnamon and something savory Sophie had been braising since morning.

Ellie intercepted them in the front hall.

She had two-year-old Clara on one hip. Clara was in a red velvet dress with a stain on the front from something chocolate that had happened within the last twenty minutes, her thumb in her mouth. She gave Holly the grave, considering look she always gave at first, before deciding to become the mayor. Ruth was already halfway across the living room, tearing toward Hazel with both hands out. Jude was in Sophie’s Nativity set through the archway, rearranging the shepherds with three-year-old intensity.

“Jude’s at it again,” Holly said.

“He’s decided that Mary should be holding the staff and the shepherd should be in the manger.” Ellie had the look of a woman who hadn’t slept a full night in five years and had made peace with it. “I don’t know why. I stopped asking.”

Holly leaned in and kissed the top of Clara’s head. “Hi, sweet pea.”

Clara took her thumb out of her mouth. “Auntie Holly.”

“There she is.”

“She’s been asking about Princess all morning,” Ellie said. “I told her Princess was coming and she’s been checking the window since ten.”

“Princess is with Nate. You want me to bring her over in a minute?”

Clara nodded the serious, emphatic nod of a two-year-old for whom a dog was a sacred event.

“How’s Ben?”

“In the kitchen with Cole. They’re doing something with the roast that Sophie says she doesn’t need help with but also isn’t stopping them. It’s complicated.”

“How’s the new project?”

“The farmhouse on Route 15.” Ellie’s whole face went warm the way it did when she talked about Ben’s work. “He’s got the staircase stripped down to the original pine. You would not believe what’s been hiding under eighty years of paint. He took me out there last weekend and made me stand at the bottom of the stairs and look up and I almost cried. It’s going to be beautiful.”

“He’s going to sell it?”

“He’s going to sell it. We’ve got the workshop behind the house humming — he’s doing all the cabinetry in-house now — and the outbuilding is stacked with reclaimed beams he bought off an old barn in Woodstock. He’s got two houses in the queue after this one.”

“Did you ever finish the beekeeper book?”

“I sent it back to her Tuesday.” Ellie’s whole face lit up. “Hol, it’s good. The second half clicked into place. She’s going to cry when she reads my letter.”

“I’m so glad.”

“I would never have gotten through it full-time. Not with three.” Ellie shifted Clara to her other hip. “Part-time was the right call. I keep telling Ben — I don’t know how I used to do four books a month. I don’t know who that woman was.” She smiled. “Go find Piper. She’s upstairs feeding Thomas. She’d love to see you.”

“Where’s Pepper?”

“Laundry room. Sophie said she needed a break from, quote, the chaos.”

Holly laughed and handed Nate Princess’s leash and went upstairs.

Piper was in the guest room at the end of the hall — the one Sophie kept made up for nursing mothers, with a door that locked and a rocking chair and a window you could look out of. Piper was in the rocking chair. Thomas was on her shoulder, one small pink fist closed around the collar of Piper’s sweater, eyes half-shut, the milk-drunk slackness of a baby who had just finished the important work of the day.

Piper looked up when Holly came in, and her face went still for a second and then soft, the way it did now whenever someone walked in on her with her baby.

“Hi,” Piper said.

“Hi.”

Holly sat down on the edge of the bed and didn’t say anything for a minute. Piper rocked. Thomas sighed in his sleep and tucked himself a half-inch deeper into her shoulder.

“He got me up at four,” Piper said. “And then again at five-thirty. And then slept until eight. I lay there at four-thirty watching him on the monitor and I thought, I’m so tired I can’t see straight, and also, thank you.”

“Both are true.”

“Both are true.” Piper laughed once, quiet. “Cole was out barn-checking when it snowed. He came in and stood in the mudroom with his hands in his pockets for a full five minutes because he didn’t want to touch the baby until he’d warmed up. Then he came in and took Thomas off my chest so I could drink my coffee while it was still hot. He does that every morning now. He sets a timer.”

“A timer.”

“For the coffee. So I get ten minutes of it hot. Every morning.” Piper laughed, quiet and a little wrecked. “I didn’t ask him to. He just started.”

“That’s love.”

“That’s love.”

Holly reached out and touched Thomas’s hair with one finger. His hair was still the baby-down kind, dark and soft and not really attached to anything. He’d been bald when he was born, and Piper had been fierce about the bald — daring anyone to comment.

“Did you get the permit? For the bunkhouse?”

“Last Thursday.” Piper smiled into Thomas’s hair. “We can break ground as soon as the frost’s out. Cole’s already got the lumber on order. Daniel’s drawings are spread out on the kitchen table. Cole keeps walking past them and just — looking.”

“Is he going to build it himself?”

“Most of it. He wants to be ready for the September intake. He’s already got two men on the waitlist.”

“Margaret made us a loaf of bread on Tuesday,” Piper said after a minute, shifting Thomas without disturbing him. “First thing she’d ever baked in her life. She brought it over and said I don’t know if it’s any good but I wanted you to have it. It was the best bread I’ve had in years. I told her so and she sat down at my kitchen table and cried.”

Holly thought about Piper’s house — the little yellow house Piper had lived alone in for years before Cole, the house she and Cole had decided, after the wedding, to keep and turn into a place where women could come. Three bedrooms full most of the year now. A kitchen where a widow from Rutland was learning to bake bread for the first time in her life and crying about it at Piper’s table.

“I keep thinking about you with her,” Piper said.

“Me?”

“You’re running a gallery and married to Nate and raising two teenagers and you haven’t stopped painting in five years.” Piper looked at her steadily. “I told her about you. I hope you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind.”

“I told her painting saved you. Because it did. You told me it did.”

“It did.”

Piper nodded. Thomas sighed against her shoulder.

“Sophie’s going to ring the bell for dinner in a minute,” Holly said.

“I know. I heard the first warning.”

“You want me to take him down?”

“No — I’ll bring him. He’ll sleep through it. He sleeps through everything Sophie does.” Piper stood carefully, settling Thomas into the crook of her arm without waking him. “He’s the calmest baby in the world. I don’t know how I got him.”

“You got him because you waited for him.”

Piper looked at her for a long second.

“Holly. Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For the thing you said to me the spring the second round of IVF didn’t work. You sat on my porch and you said it wasn’t my fault. That I hadn’t done anything wrong. That I hadn’t been bad at wanting, or bad at hoping, or bad at being a woman. I think about it all the time.”

“That’s because it’s true.”

“I needed it. I didn’t know how much I needed it.”

Piper walked out of the guest room with Thomas asleep on her shoulder and Holly followed her down the hall. The house below was getting louder — small children and grown-ups and the soft thud of Sophie’s wooden spoon against a pot, and somewhere the opening notes of the same Christmas record Sophie played every year, the one with the choir on it.

The ballroom was full when they came down.

Sophie was at the long table, moving a candlestick by a quarter of an inch. Daniel was next to her, handing her a napkin ring she hadn’t asked for, which Sophie took without looking because she already knew it was coming. Sophie’s kids were under the table — four-year-old Nora in a green dress with a pinecone crown she’d made herself, and two-year-old Theo in corduroy overalls, crawling around Nora’s feet with a wooden car he’d been issued as a distraction from the silverware. Daniel’s hand was on the small of Sophie’s back where it lived now, and when he leaned down to say something to her and she laughed — the low private laugh Holly had only heard Sophie use with Daniel — Holly had to look at the candles for a second.

Most of Daniel’s work was elsewhere now — the old Baptist church in Montpelier he was converting to a library, the 1840s farmhouse in Stowe he’d stabilized over three seasons last year, the train depot in Brattleboro whose owners had called him after seeing the church. Daniel had a firm now. Two draftsmen and a project manager. An office on Main Street above Gerald Fitch’s hardware store. He still traveled — Montpelier for two nights, Brattleboro for three, Burlington for a day — but never more than a few nights at a time. He’d told Holly once, quietly, over coffee, that he’d made himself a rule. Whatever else the work asked of him, it didn’t get to ask for Sophie and the kids for more than three nights in a row.

Ben and Cole were coming out of the kitchen with a roast between them like it was a stretcher. Nate had already gotten involved because Nate couldn’t watch two men carry something without wanting to check the angle, and he was walking beside them giving quiet carpenter-observations that Ben was waving off and Cole was absorbing.

Jude was already in his seat, kneeling up on a chair next to Ben’s, stabbing a dinner roll with a fork for reasons only Jude understood. Ruth was in the chair beside Hazel, sitting up straight with her hands folded because Hazel had sat up straight with her hands folded and Ruth was committed to being Hazel tonight. Clara was on Ellie’s lap at Ellie’s place setting, babbling a mile a minute at Emma across the table, and Emma was nodding with the whole-body attention a thirteen-year-old gave to a two-year-old when she’d decided the two-year-old was her favorite person.

Daniel saw Holly and lifted his chin in greeting — the Daniel hello, unchanged in six years.

“Hol. Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas, Daniel.”

Sophie looked up from the candlestick. “Are you all going to stand in my archway or are you going to sit down?”

“We’re going to sit down,” Daniel said.

“Then sit down.”

They sat down.

Sophie’s table on Christmas Eve was the thing Holly had been trying for six years to figure out how to paint. She’d done studies of it. She had three half-finished canvases in her studio at home that were all attempts at it, and none of them were right, because the thing about Sophie’s table wasn’t the table. It was what the table was holding. Twelve adults and seven children if you counted Thomas, and the faces of everyone Holly loved most in the world, and the candles and the cedar and the wine and the water glasses Sophie had picked out deliberately, and the way the whole room looked like it had been waiting for exactly this group of people to sit down in it.

Holly sat between Nate and Emma. Hazel was across from her, next to Ruth, who had appointed herself Hazel’s assistant for the evening and was watching Hazel’s every move with the reverent attention of a five-year-old who had a thirteen-year-old cousin for the first time in her life.

Sophie stood at the head of the table.

“I’m only going to say one thing,” Sophie said, “and then I’m going to sit down because Daniel is going to pinch me if I say too much.”

“I am not,” Daniel said.

“He is. Okay. Here’s the thing. I’ve done six Christmas Eves in this house now. And every one of them has been different. The first one was twelve of us. Tonight we are nineteen.” Sophie stopped. She looked down the table. Holly had never seen Sophie lose her composure at the head of a table, and she didn’t lose it now, but she paused long enough that the room went very still, and the only sound was Thomas’s small sleeping breathing against Piper’s shoulder. “I just want to say I’m so glad it’s all of you. I’m so glad it’s every single one of you. That’s all. Merry Christmas. Somebody pass the rolls.”

Ellie passed the rolls.

Holly ate. She listened.

Ben told a story about a staircase in the Route 15 farmhouse — hand-built in 1901 by a man who had clearly been drunk when he did it, and by the end of the story Cole was wiping his eyes on the back of his hand from laughing. Piper held Thomas through the whole meal without putting him down once, because Piper had years of not being able to hold a baby and had decided she would hold this one for every meal of his life if she felt like it. Ruth asked Hazel three times if she could braid Hazel’s hair after dinner. Nora came out from under the table and climbed into Daniel’s lap and fell asleep with her pinecone crown pressing against his collarbone. Jude ate three rolls.

Emma leaned against Holly’s shoulder halfway through the meal. Thirteen-year-old Emma didn’t lean against people much anymore — thirteen had brought a self-conscious shoulder-pull Holly had been mourning quietly all fall — but she leaned tonight. Holly didn’t comment. She just let her daughter’s head rest on her shoulder and kept eating with her other hand.

Nate noticed. Nate noticed everything. He didn’t look over, but his knee moved against hers under the table, once, and then stayed.

After dinner, Holly went out on the back porch with her coat and a glass of wine she wasn’t going to finish.

It was still snowing. Sophie’s yard was the thing it was every Christmas Eve — the gazebo down at the edge of the lawn, the stone path to it half-covered now, the garden dormant and waiting under a foot of white. Six years of Christmas Eves and it was still the same gazebo where Nate had put both his hands on her waist and she’d said okay and he’d said okay and the word had landed between them like a promise neither one of them had thought they were allowed to make.

Nate came out a minute later. Of course.

He didn’t say anything. He just came up beside her at the rail, coat unzipped, no hat, his breath fogging in the cold. Holly leaned into him without looking, and he put his arm around her, and they stood there and looked at the gazebo.

“I was thinking about Owen just now,” Holly said.

“Yeah.”

“Not sad thinking. Just — thinking. I was thinking about him at the kitchen table on Sunday mornings doing the crossword in pen. Always in pen. He wouldn’t let himself use a pencil. He said it was cheating. And I was thinking how much he would’ve loved Sophie’s Christmas Eve. He would’ve eaten three rolls too. He was a three-roll guy.”

Nate smiled. “Natalie was the opposite. She’d eat a single roll and make it last the whole meal. She called it pacing.”

“Pacing.”

“She had a theory. She said if you ate your roll fast you ran out of roll and then the rest of the meal was a roll-less existence.”

Holly laughed, quietly, into his coat.

“She would’ve loved this too.”

“Yeah.”

“Both of them.”

“Yeah.”

They stood there. The snow came down. Inside, somebody was laughing — Cole, probably, still laughing about Ben’s drunk carpenter — and somebody else was saying something to one of the kids, and Sophie was undoubtedly moving a candlestick a quarter of an inch somewhere, and all of it came through the glass doors behind them muffled and warm, and Holly thought about the painting she still hadn’t figured out how to make.

Maybe the painting wasn’t the table.

Maybe the painting was the view from the table. The gazebo in the snow. The yard sloping down to it. The hills beyond. Nineteen people at a candlelit table behind her, and the small wooden roof where her life had turned right there in front of her, and Nate’s shoulder against hers in the frame.

She’d try that one tomorrow.

“Nate.”

“Yeah.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too, Hol.”

“Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas.”

He kissed the top of her head. His coffee was probably going cold on the counter inside. Nate’s coffee was always going cold somewhere, in every season, in every room, for as long as she’d known him. It was one of the things she knew about him, like every sound the new house made, like which stair in the upstairs hall creaked third from the top.

Holly turned around and went back inside to her family.