CHAPTER 6 Cousins Arrive with Opinions

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Cousin Tobias shook Elodie's hand, calculated her net worth with his eyes, and let go in under three seconds.

By nine o'clock the next morning, Hollin Hall had been invaded.

They came in three cars and a pickup truck. Tobias arrived first, a heavy, pink-faced young man in a very expensive coat, Winifred's son. Behind him came a pair of teenage twins, Marguerite and Anselm, who each carried a phone and one expression of weary contempt. Then a great-uncle in a wheelchair, who announced that he was deaf and therefore would not be answering any questions. Then a baby. Elodie never learned whose.

The house, which had felt like a cold, quiet cathedral, became a market.

"And what is it you do, Miss Marchetti?" Tobias asked at the foot of the stairs, thumbs in his waistcoat. "Besides marry?"

"I run a company with three hundred and twelve shops and eleven thousand employees," said Elodie pleasantly. "It keeps me out of trouble."

"Hm," said Tobias, who looked as though he had been hoping for a smaller number.

"It's tradition," Julian said grimly in the front hall, as the pickup driver unloaded a Christmas tree the size of a small ship. "Every Christmas Eve Eve, the Hales trim the tree together. It's a sacred rite. People have wept."

"Good weeping or bad weeping?"

"Historically? Both."

She laughed. It slipped out of her before she could stop it, and Julian looked at her sideways with something dangerously close to a smile, and the exact same moment, Cordelia came down the stairs in a pale blue sweater, her red hair loose, and said, "Julian, Odalys wants you in the library."

He went. Elodie watched him go. She was unreasonably annoyed to find that she minded.

"It gets easier," said Cordelia, falling in beside her. "Or at least, you get used to it."

"Do you?" said Elodie, and meant it as politely as she could. "Get used to it?"

Cordelia's smile faltered. "No," she said. "Not really."

The tree was raised in the great drawing room, wedged into a stand by four men and a great deal of language. Boxes of ornaments appeared, old tissue paper, tarnished brass, hand-blown glass. And all at once the room was full, cousins and children and the deaf great-uncle, arguing happily about where the angel went. Odalys sat enthroned by the fire, directing operations with her cane. It felt, for a moment, like a real family. Messy. Loud. Warm as bread.

Across the room, Winifred and Tobias stood with their heads together, murmuring. When Elodie glanced over, Tobias's eyes slid, very quickly, toward the leather briefcase Julian had left on the library desk beyond the open doors. Then he smiled at her, pink and innocent as a ham.

Elodie was handed a box by Aunt Winifred. "This is the Hale box," she said. "The oldest ones. The children aren't allowed to touch them."

Inside lay a nest of yellow tissue and, in it, a tiny, perfect glass ship. A schooner, hand-painted, its sails the blue of old lace.

"That's Julian's," said Winifred, quieter now. "His father gave it to him when he was six. He hangs it himself, every year. Nobody else is allowed." She hesitated. "He didn't hang it for six years after. Odalys did. And then last Christmas, he did again. We all noticed."

Elodie lifted the little ship. It was weightless. She turned it in the light, and the sails flashed, and a feeling went through her that she did not have a name for, something tender and frightened at once.

When Julian came back from the library, she was standing by the tree with the ship in her palm. He stopped dead.

"I didn't hang it," she said at once. "I know it's yours. I only..."

"It's all right." His voice was rough. The room had gone quiet around them, the way a room does when a family realizes something is about to happen. "Would you like to?"

"I don't..."

"Together," said Julian. "Elodie. Please."

He had never said her name like that before, as if it were something he was asking permission to hold. She nodded. They stood at the tree, shoulder to shoulder, and she held out the little ship, and his hand closed over hers. Warm. Careful. They chose a branch high up near the middle, where the lights were thickest, and hung it together, and for a moment neither of them let go.

Someone sniffled. It was, she saw with amazement, Tobias. The room, with a great collective rustle, resumed its noise.

That should have been the moment. The pretty, aching, sweet-as-sugar moment. And it would have been, if Rafe had not chosen that instant to materialize at Elodie's side, a mug of mulled cider in each hand, and say in a clear, cheerful, carrying voice, "Elodie, I've been meaning to ask you. Are you free for the sleigh ride this afternoon? I've been told I'm the only man in the family who can drive one."

"Rafe," said Julian.

"Only asking."

"I'd love to," said Elodie, surprising herself, and saw Julian's face go smooth as a plate.

It was a game. She understood that after thirty seconds. Rafe was not flirting with her. Rafe was poking at his cousin the way you poke a bruise to see if it still hurts, and Julian, who could outlast a hostile boardroom without a flicker, was losing, silently and completely, to a man in a Fair Isle sweater with a mug of cider.

The sleigh ride lasted forty minutes. Rafe drove the horses like a man auditioning for an opera, singing most of the way, and Elodie, wrapped in blankets, learned two things. The first was that Rafe Hale was funnier and kinder than he let on. The second was that he had not asked her for a sleigh ride at all.

"I wanted a word," he said, as the horses slowed on the ridge above the Hall, the house spread out below them like a gray stone ship in a white sea. "My cousin doesn't know how to ask for things. I thought if I made him furious, he might learn."

"That's a terrible plan."

"It's the only one I've got." Rafe turned and, for the first time, his face lost its performance. "I'll tell you something. I don't want to split the company. I'm the one who's supposed to want it. Winifred and Tobias push me to vote for the sale, and I have said yes to them for six years because it was easier than being the second cousin who ruins Christmas." He looked at the reins. "But I've seen him look at you. And I've never seen him look at anything."

She held very still. "Rafe. It's not..."

"Don't." He smiled, crooked. "I'm a professional liar, Elodie. I'd know. Whatever you are to each other, whatever's written down somewhere. I just hope you're both braver than he and I have been."

He clicked his tongue. The horses started down the hill. And all the way back to the Hall, with the snow turning blue in the dusk and bells jingling on the harness, Elodie held her own hands tightly under the blanket and wondered how many people in this house knew more about the contract than she did.