Hannah put her head on Noelle’s stomach and looked up at her.
“Are you panicking because a certain beautiful cousin of mine is supposed to give us an answer tomorrow, or are you panicking because said cousin has a real flesh-and-blood fiancée you can no longer ignore?” Hannah asked.
“Miriam’ssobeautiful, and talented, and funny. I want to hate her, but she’s actually great? Which makes me really mad?” Noelle stopped for breath. “She might be good for Carrigan’s? Or she might be a flight risk who disappears as soon as we all start to rely on her? She makes everything too complicated. I don’t want her to stay, because I’ll want to date her and I can’t. Idowant her to stay and be single and make out with my face. I think I’ve been doing a great job of not freaking out about this situation up to this point, but I have reached my limit!” She pushed herself up, away from the headboard, and tugged on her hair.
Her best friend gave her a level stare. “You have been doing an absolutely terrible job of not freaking out about this but go on. Wait, first, why can’t you date her? Other than the fiancée?”
“What if we broke up, and we still co-owned the farm together? It would be catastrophic!” Noelle said, throwing her arms up. Miriam was obviously trying hard to sort out the tangle of her emotions, and Noelle should not even be considering complicating that. She was a terrible person, and she should not have feelings of any kind for Miriam, and she was going to stop as soon as she figured out how.
“Yes, I cannot imagine anything worse on this Earth than co-owning Carrigan’s with your ex,” Hannah said.
Noelle cringed. “That was thoughtless.”
Hannah waved it off. “Please continue with your freak-out.”
“How can she not know what she wants? How can she not want to grab Carrigan’s with both hands and never let go? I don’t trust that. And now this fiancée.”
Hannah sighed.
“You think I’m overreacting,” Noelle pouted.
“I would never say you’re overreacting, because (a) that is made-up and (b) this is the biggest decision of our lives. Also I know you haven’t had a crush in over a decade so this feels fatal.” Hannah coiled her hair on the top of her head in a scrunchy, like she did when she was about to do Serious Thinking. It was an impressive feat because she had Rapunzel’s hair.
“Do you honestly think she can make this whole plan work?” Noelle asked.
“I don’t know,” Hannah said. “I think so? I don’t think she’s as big a flight risk as she seems. She’s got an interesting perspective, and she’s a successful working artist. That’s hard. And she did it mostly through working her butt off and very keen marketing savvy. We maybe have a better chance of saving the farm with her.”
“You know who might have an idea of what she’ll do?” Noelle wondered, and then stuck her head out into the hallway.
“Nicholas!” she called, and Cole materialized, all big shoulders and blond waves and neon green seersucker shorts—an interesting choice for late November in the Adirondacks.
“You summoned?” he asked, walking in, scooping up Kringle before settling himself on the edge of the bed.
“We have a question, and you know things,” Hannah told him.
Cole looked cagey. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Calm down, we don’t want hacking secrets. You know things about what Miri will do, as her best friend,” Noelle explained. “And we are trying to figure out if she’s going to stay or go.”
Cole relaxed. “I haven’t known what Miriam was going to do since she called me to say she was flying to Carrigan’s. It’s an all-new era for Miriam Blum. Anything could happen.”
The next day, they sat down to Thanksgiving dinner gently, as if their happy facade were a physical thing that might shatter at any moment.
Like Halloween, the Thanksgiving meal had been a massive get-together in years past. Now, there were a few locals who came to have their dinner at Carrigan’s, but the dining room (and the guest rooms) was mostly empty. The table, however, was overfull of traditional upstate New York food, because, Mrs. Matthews argued, it tasted better than Thanksgiving food.
“I appreciate your refusal to bow to cultural norms,” Cole said, surveying the dishes.
“We secretly hate Thanksgiving,” Mr. Matthews whispered.
“It’s not a secret,” Hannah whispered back.
“Thanksgiving,” Noelle grumbled, “is the darkest day of the year. It’s racist, the food is terrible, and you have to spend enforced time with your family, watching grown men get serious head injuries for fun and profit. It’s a perfect storm of bad vibes.”
“We used to have fun Thanksgivings with the Rosensteins,” Hannah said, pushing potatoes around on her plate, “but Miriam never got to come.”
“I don’t think we were invited,” Miriam admitted, her eyes on her plate, her voice small.
“I’m sure you were,” Hannah told her, “because the aunts and uncles all complained every year that you weren’t there.”