Holly did not ask if Kinzi was sure, since she obviously didn’t know she phrased every sentence as a question.

  Half an hour later, she let herself get led up the back stairs to a little apartment that had clearly been recently stripped of all its extra stuff by someone moving out. There was a neatly made double bed, faded blue paisley curtains that would do nothing to keep out the sun, and a beat-up old wooden dresser, plus a rickety metal bedside table with a lamp. It looked like someone had furnished it from their grandmother’s garage sale.

  It also felt like home and comforting as hell after a week of feeling like a fish out of water with millionaires and celebrities.

  “Um, do you have, like, a bag?” Kinzi asked, hovering in the doorway as Holly sat down on the bed and felt the old springs bounce.

  “It’s coming with Ernie,” Holly said.

  Kinzi was silent for a moment, obviously waiting for an explanation that wasn’t coming. “Okay, well, the bathroom should be stocked? Brady, the guy who took over for me? He can get you anything if you need it before Ernie gets back? I’m going to go wrap some presents for tomorrow?”

  God, tomorrow was Christmas.

  “Thanks, Kinzi, this is perfect,” she said, trying to channel Tara and be polite, since this girl had done nothing but be kind and helpful (she’d even hit on her respectfully) and also because she thought Ernie would frown on Holly snapping at the waitstaff. Holly was, she was certain, already on thin ice.

  Kinzi nodded and went to leave, turning back at the door. “The TV works but only on channel three?”

  “Who needs more than one channel?” Holly joked to put Kinzi at ease. “Merry Christmas, Kinzi.”

  That got a genuine smile. “You too, Holly.”

  Sometime after midnight, she was propped up against the lumpy pillows on the bed, watching an informercial on channel 3, when Ernie knocked on the door.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d still be up, but I wanted to check that you were okay,” she said, pulling Holly’s duffel inside with her. “And give you your clothes, since you’re still stuck in the dress you wore to the wedding.”

  Holly smiled a little wryly. “It’s really kind of you, especially considering…”

  Ernie waved her words away. “I don’t have any loyalty to Tara, and she’s got a whole battalion to ride for her. You helped me out when you didn’t have to, so I’m returning the favor. So. What do you need? You obviously can’t drive back to Charleston with Tara, but after Christmas, we could get you on a plane? Or you can stay here as long as you’d like. The offer stands—I could use a waitress like you.”

  “You don’t think the Carrigan’s crew would avoid the bar like the plague if I was there?”

  This earned her an eye roll. “Please, what is this, high school? They can come in, or they can miss pub quiz, and Miriam never misses pub quiz.”

  It was a tempting offer. She liked Advent, and she’d already been thinking about moving on from Charleston. She couldn’t imagine going back to Emma’s, having to serve Tara coffee and cake and pretend everything was fine. But she would have to go back to pack up her apartment and get her car. And before that…

  “I think,” she said, taking a deep breath, “that what I’d like to do next is go home for Christmas.”

  Ernie blinked at her, then looked at her watch. “Okay, well, it’s already Christmas, and I don’t know where home is, but you might need to pull off some kind of magic trick to get there. Do you know what travel is going to be like today?”

  “Know anywhere I can rent a car? It’s a fifteen-hour drive, or twelve the way I drive. If I leave now, I can be there before they eat lunch.”

  “Oh, you’re not leaving now. You’re sleeping.” Ernie shook her head. “If you want to leave after you sleep, I’ll start looking at flights or find you a car. Or a Greyhound. But you might want to think about planning to do New Year’s with your family.”

  Holly didn’t want to wait. Now that she’d decided, after all these years of avoiding Christmas at home, she wanted to go immediately. She admitted to herself, though, that maybe she didn’t want to keep sitting alone in her feelings. No matter how poorly she’d treated Tara, her parents would be thrilled to see her and would bandage over all her wounded emotions.

  “I’ll sleep,” she conceded, and Ernie left her to do that.

  Before she put on her pajamas, she finally texted her sister back. After the unanswered “Where are you?” text, there had been several more, increasingly worried, “What the hell is going on?” texts.

  Holly: Hey, I’m still in Upstate New York… but I’m looking to head home. Help?

  By the time she woke up the next morning, there was a plane ticket in her email. She didn’t know how her sister had done it—or how she’d afforded it—but she didn’t question it. She just got her ass in gear to make her flight on time.

  She left Ernie a note, taped to the old TV:

  I can’t thank you enough. Maybe I’ll see you again, someday, when you really need a waitress.

  She left the keys to Gavi’s Subaru on the bedside table and ordered the town’s one Lyft to the airport.

  And then she headed away from Advent, and Carrigan’s, without a backward glance. She’d finally found something bigger and badder to run away from than home.

  Chapter 27

  Tara

  The Carrigan’s crew had insisted that Tara stay through the end of the year.

  Elijah and Jason threw a hell of a New Queers Party at Ernie’s, they argued. Somehow, despite all the things she was supposed to be doing, she’d ended up agreeing. This place, once it had you, liked to keep you. She began to understand how people kept coming up for a visit and staying for a decade.

  New Year’s came and went, and she didn’t leave. She had been thinking about Charleston every day for three weeks, but she kept freezing up and unpacking her bags again.

  What was she doing with her life? If she burned herself out dealing with her family—which was inevitable, she had to admit, and she’d been doing it on purpose—would she be able to keep showing up for clients? What good would that be for anyone? It still wouldn’t prove that she’d been enough all along.

  She was obsessing about this at every moment that she wasn’t obsessing about Holly, although she was good at multitasking, so she was often obsessing about both at once. After all these years of building a life brick by brick on the idea that she didn’t need romantic love—that falling in love would make her vulnerable and put any woman she loved in a terrible position—it had never occurred to her that maybe she should choose a less terrible position to put herself in.

  Miriam had broken off their engagement because she’d realized she wanted love, not a marriage of convenience. Tara hadn’t understood what she meant. Why would anyone want a love story? She’d spent all her life putting up walls against everyone she could possibly imagine falling for, but she could never have imagined Holly, so she hadn’t guarded against her.

  She hadn’t tried to call Holly. Some days, she wanted to demand an apology for all the horrible things Holly had said, and the next day she wanted to apologize herself for devaluing Holly so much that she’d actually tried to get her a “respectable” job so that she would be acceptable to the Chadwicks. She also hadn’t put on hard pants, or straightened her hair, for weeks. Noelle had told her, lovingly, that if she didn’t stop listening to Miranda Lambert’s “Mama’s Broken Heart” on repeat, Noelle was going to lock her in the attic like Bertha Rochester.

  “I should call her,” she said to Cole, a month after the wedding.

  “Oh no.” He took her phone out of her hands. “You’re not ready.”

  She snatched it back. “How do you know? And who put you in charge of making my decisions for me?”

  “Well, you put me in charge, Tara Sloane, when you made me your best friend,” he said calmly, as if this were the most obvious thing in the world.

  She breathed deeply. “I did not appoint you to that position. You were just there. Can you answer my first question, please?”

  “You asked two. I answered the latter. That’s how conversations work. Anyway, I’m you, so I know you’re not ready.”

  “What do you mean, you’re me?”

  “I have a theory.”

  Tara sighed. Cole always had a theory. “Tell me.”

  “You know how in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the souls are split in two and then they try to find each other?” He pantomimed this.

  “And also in Plato, the source of that story?” she reminded him.

  He scoffed. “Whatever. I think our souls are actually the same soul and we didn’t have to look for each other because we were already together.”

  Blinking, Tara said, “That’s a wild theory, Nicholas.”

  “Mmm-hmm. So’s COINTELPRO, but here we are. Because we’re the same person, I know you’re not ready, because you’re falling in love, but you haven’t decided yet whether or not you’re going to let yourself fall all the way.”

  “I can’t be,” she argued, though she knew he was right. “It’s ridiculous. We were together for a week. People don’t actually fall in love on the first date.”

  Cole laughed. “Of course they do. People do it every day. There’s not a correct way to fall in love. Some people never do, some people do with multiple people at once, and some people fall in love once in their lives, in the blink of an eye, and all those things are equally valid. It’s not, like, logical. Also it happened to me, so I guarantee it’s possible.”

  Maybe she only thought she was falling in love because he was.

  The idea that she could, truly, have fallen halfway in love basically instantaneously was taking some adjusting of her worldview but, surprisingly, less than the idea that Cole Fraser actually loved her as much as she loved him. Maybe it was because she’d always known she was capable of deep love and had never known she was capable of being loved.

  She sighed. “Okay, know-it-all. When will I be ready?”

  He shrugged. “When you know what you want. With your life. With your job, your family, your heart.”

  “How the hell am I supposed to know that?” She couldn’t even be trusted to know when to call a girl. She didn’t even know who she was.

  “You could always stay in Advent!” Cole singsonged. “We would love to keep you!”

  How quickly he had become part of the “we” of this community.

  “What would I do here?”

  He shrugged, seemingly unconcerned. “Work with Elijah?”

  “He practices estate law, and I don’t,” Tara pointed out. “I’m pretty sure they don’t have a lot of need for a criminal defense attorney in the wilderness.”

  “So take a year off. Learn to knit. Take cooking classes. Volunteer at the library.”

  Had he met her? There was no way she could be happy doing nothing. Holly might have made her rethink how much of her identity she derived from her profession, but she wasn’t ready to become a lady of leisure.

  “I hate snow, and I love the South,” she reminded him. “I love living and working in, and fighting for, the South, Cole.”

  Cole sighed. “Tara Sloane, as much as both of us hate to talk about the ramifications of this reality, we are rich. You know that, right?”

  Tara nodded in resignation.

  “So you have, like, so many options that only rich people have,” he continued. “You can live in Advent in the summer, and Atlanta or Birmingham or Savannah or, hell, Asheville, with all the other white Southern gays, in the winter, for instance. It’s actually a very short flight.”

  “I’m not becoming a snowbird,” Tara scoffed.

  He waved this off. He never let her have any of her excuses. “So split your weeks or something. You can decide that some options don’t work for you, for a variety of reasons, but you can’t say you don’t have any options, Tar.”

  “How will I know which one is right?” she cried, pulling on her hair.

  Cole cocked an eyebrow at her, stealing her own move. “Why do you need to?”

  What did he mean, why did she need to? “All my life, I’ve tried to do the next right thing. You know this.”

  He stared pointedly.

  “What?!” she demanded.

  “I mean, babe, how has that worked out for you so far?” A mean but fair point. “Maybe you should try doing the next wrong thing. Or even, the next thing.”

  February brought one answer about the next right—or maybe the next wrong—thing.

  Lucy, her assistant, called her right before Valentine’s Day in a panic. “Boss, you gotta get back here pronto.”

  What kind of twenty-four-year-old said “pronto”? Lucy was a treasure.

  “What’s up, kid?”

  “Randolph is taking the case to trial.”

  Again, Tara didn’t ask what case. The huge one. The one she’d fought to be allowed to take, because the partners at her firm thought it was social justice warrior bullshit that wouldn’t make them any money, and that her client wasn’t worth defending. The one she’d pushed her ethics to the line trying to keep on track.

  “He’s fucking what?” Randolph was the senior partner at her firm.

  Lucy drew in a sharp breath. “Some of the true crime podcasts have started talking about the case, and HBO called about doing a special. You’ve been off the grid, and Randolph…”

  “Wants the glory. And now he can take my work and spin it to make the firm look altruistic and progressive.” Tara nodded to herself. Fuck. She couldn’t even argue, even if her boss would listen to her, because as good as she was in front of a jury, Randolph was the best, and at the end of the day, Tara wanted her client to get the best defense.

  The case had been the only thing pushing her to get back home, the only real responsibility she had left there. She had a moment’s hot anger at having so much work stolen from her, and then an overwhelming wave of relief. She didn’t have to go back yet. Oh, she was going to eventually. The South was in her bones and her blood, and she loved it deeply. But right now, she could stay at Carrigan’s, wrapped up with her friends in this little magical pocket universe for a little while longer while she figured out who the hell she was. Because if she went back to Charleston now, she’d never know.

  Carrigan’s had shown her a mirror version of her life, and a version of herself that she’d never imagined, but she didn’t know how to take that version of herself out into the world yet.

  “Lucy, my dear girl, I am quitting the firm. I highly recommend you do the same. I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing next, but when I figure it out, I’ll call you to see if you’re available.”

  “Oh, I will be,” Lucy assured her. “Where you lead, I will follow.”

  Tara only knew this was a Gilmore Girls reference because she’d been letting Cole catch her up on TV she’d missed, and they’d been systematically making their way through the WB catalog. She now had a lot of opinions on Piper vs. Prue Halliwell, and teenage aliens who loved hot sauce.

  Then, rather than having Galentine’s Tea or a Valentine’s special for couples, the Carrigan’s team leaned hard into supporting Tara’s broken heart by hosting an Anti-Love Party. They played angry breakup music, decorated broken heart cookies, and wore their best black outfits.

  It was… fun? It was a lot of fun. She hadn’t played, for the fun of it, since she’d burned down her life. Until she came to Carrigan’s.

  While she was gleefully writing Luv Sux on a cookie in pink icing, Elijah Green sat down next to her. “Needs glitter,” he observed.

  “You’re not wrong.” She picked up some edible glitter and sprinkled it on.

  Jason and Elijah were constantly planning fun outings with what seemed like every queer person in Upstate New York. Noelle and Miriam often went and always invited her along. Getting to know them and their friends had put into stark contrast what she had waiting for her at home—polo matches and brunches where drunk straight women complained about dating.

  “Not to add salt to the Valentine’s wound,” Elijah said, gesturing at the broken heart in Tara’s hand, “but any thoughts about what you’re doing next?”

  She made a face. “Lots of thoughts, but none of them great. You got any ideas, most brilliant lawyer friend?”

  “Have you thought about consulting?” he asked, popping some cookie into his mouth. “Working with people around the country defending tough cases? It would give you a lot of outside-Charleston options. Hell, you could do it from here.”

  She almost said no, reflexively. She almost said, “I can’t settle anywhere but Charleston.” But she stopped herself. Even if that were true, eventually, for the rest of her life, what was true right now? That she had no job to go back to and no real connections to do the kind of work she wanted to do going forward.

  Consulting was smart. Really smart. It would let her collaborate with amazing people, on her own schedule, anywhere. And she could still take on her own cases. No wonder the Carrigan’s crew spent so much money keeping this man on as their lawyer.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said. “Consulting, not staying here permanently. I’m not the kind of gay who wants to start a commune in the woods with her ex.”

  “I can’t wait to hear what you decide,” Elijah told her warmly. Then, looking over her shoulder, his eyes widened. “I think your friends are descending.”

  He fled in the face of Cole and Hannah. They flanked her, Cole on her right and Hannah on her left. Cole stole what was left of her cookie.

  “Isn’t Elijah a great friend?” Hannah asked. “Wouldn’t it be great if you lived here and could hang out with him all the time?”

  They were relentless. “I can’t just live in your hotel. You need to rent out the rooms.”

  “We are renting them!” Hannah reminded her. “To you.”

  Noelle appeared and sat across from them. “You could stay here in the back cabin. Unlimited Rosenstein’s pastries and Kringle snuggles, zero parrot wallpaper.”

 

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