Page 22 of No Business Like Snow Business

“We all make our choices,” he said with a faint smile. “And I’ve made mine.” For a moment the silence lay between us, heavy and low like storm clouds about to break, and then Sterling picked up the menu and said, “Is the cheesecake good?”

“Um,” I said, then echoed the question he’d asked me moments ago: “Do you want to talk about it?”

“The cheesecake? I’d like your opinion on it, yes.”

“No. The other thing.”

“No,” he said, his faint smile back again. “I definitely don’t want to talk about that.”

But he’d brought it up, hadn’t he? Maybe he didn’t want to talk about it, but he wanted me to know. After my confession about Steven, he’d wanted me to feel like I wasn’t alone. Sterling had said I thought the best of people, and he was probably right. Because the one thing I was certain of, as we ate our burgers and fries in a booth in The Shack, was that Sterling Van Ruyven was a better man than he thought he was. And before he left Christmas Falls, I was going to help him figure that out and believe it just as much as I did.

Travis Jones of Wonderland Heating & Cooling didn’t answer his phone after lunch, so I left him a message and then decided to take Sterling on a stroll through downtown Christmas Falls, or Santa’s Village as the tourist maps called it. It was a nice day, chilly but bright, and the garlands wrapped around the old-fashioned lamp posts glittered in the sunlight. There were more tourists than locals in the streets today, which was no surprise with the festival underway. And if the number of people on the sidewalk meant that Sterling and I brushed against each other sometimes as we walked, then that was just an added bonus.

“Has the town changed much since the nineties?” Sterling asked me, inhaling deeply as we passed Ginger’s Breads. I didn’t blame him. Was there anything nicer in the world than the smell of a bakery?

“Yes and no,” I said. “Downtown looks pretty much the same as it always did, but a bunch of the businesses have changed. Like I think Season’s Readings used to be a shoe store once upon a time? I’d have to check that. But if you took someone from a hundred years ago and dumped them in the middle ofdowntown, they’d recognize it as Christmas Falls. Well, it was Milton Falls back then.”

Sterling looked up and down Prancer Street. There was a faraway expression on his handsome face, and I wondered if he was trying to see Christmas Falls as Freddy might have, all those years ago.

We crossed Prancer Street, passing Santa’s Workshop and the Dancing Sugar Plums, and then crossed Dasher Street to Sugar Plum Park. Sugar Plum Park was the heart of the festival, with its massive tree. The entrance to the park was guarded by a huge wooden gnome dressed as Santa. When we passed it, a mom and dad were trying to get their kids to stand still long enough to take a photo with it. Even in the middle of the day, Sugar Plum Park was busy. Food trucks lined the place, and there was a live band playing in the old, ornate gazebo.

“Back in the nineties,” I said, “this would have been full of teenagers in Blitzen’s caps. I think Bob and Linda employed almost every kid in town at some point. This is where Cap Guy would have worked. It’s probably where the photograph with Freddy was taken.”

There was a whole story unspooling in my head. I imagined Freddy coming here to hang out while he waited for Cap Guy to finish working. What did Cap Guy do? Maybe he’d worked the cotton candy machines, or maybe he’d run the train rides they’d had back then for the little kids, or maybe he’d roasted chestnuts, or made hotdogs or pretzels, or walked around selling hot cocoa to thirsty festival goers. Blitzen’s had left its fingerprints—hoofprints?—all over the festival back then.

We stopped to get caramel corn, even though we’d both just eaten, because who could resist caramel corn? Sterling, apparently. I could tell he was doing his best not to give me the side eye when I dug in.

“What’s it like growing up here?” he asked when we continued walking. “Don’t you ever get sick of Christmas?”

I considered his question and then shrugged. “Well, it hasn’t happened yet. Where did you grow up?”

“Manhattan.”

“Of course!”

He shot me a bemused look. “What do you mean,of course?”

So I wasn’t saying I had a type or anything, or that I’d crushed obsessively on all the guys fromGossip Girlwhen I was a tween, but Grandma wasn’t at all shocked when I came out to her a little later. The life-sized poster of Ed Westwick on my bedroom wall might have given it away. The point was, I could see it. Sterling absolutely belonged in that Manhattan crowd—presuming they had the same vibe in real life as they did on The CW—with his expensive coat, his haughty good looks, and his ridiculous cheekbones.

I shoved some caramel corn in my mouth to save me from having to answer. Then I said, through my mouthful, “Oh, look! Pretzels!”

“We just had lunch,” he said.

“True.” I ate some more caramel corn.

“Why is it obvious I grew up in Manhattan?” he asked me.

Wow, he really wasn’t letting that go, was he?

“You just give off that vibe,” I said, waving a hand at him. “Like, all wealthy and businessy and stuff.”

“Businessy isn’t a word.”

“It absolutely is. I said it, and you understood the meaning I conveyed, and what’s a better definition of what a word is than that?”

He shook his head in what I hoped was a ‘Harvey is endearing’ kind of way, and not a ‘I am going to strangle him with my bare hands as soon as we’re out of the sight of witnesses’one. The twitch of his mouth assured me it was probably the first one.

“Was Freddy businessy too?”

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