LITMIR.BIZ

       EPILOGUE

      TWENTY-TWO gallons of hot chocolate.

      Ten of mulled wine.

      Four hundred and sixty-two painstakingly decorated Christmas cookies.

      And it was not going to be nearly enough.

      “If you lift that kettle of hot chocolate, I’m throwing you over my shoulder and taking you home,” Ryder told Emma, irritated.

      “I love it when you’re masterful,” she said, clearly not seeing how serious the situation was.

      “I’m not joking, Emma.”

      “Ha. As if you could pick me up right now.”

      “I could,” he said threateningly. He still felt this thrill when he looked at her and used the word wife. This woman had come into herself so completely it nearly made him dizzy that she had chosen to love him. Emma was sassy, confident, radiant, strong, on fire with her love of life. And of him.

      “Okay, okay,” she said. “Tim, could you get this hot chocolate for me? Ryder has decided I’m delicate.”

      Tim, Jr., came over and lifted the pot of warm liquid easily. “You are delicate,” he told her sternly. “Keep an eye on her, Ryder. I don’t trust her as far as I could throw her.”

      “And that would not be very far,” Emma said giving her huge belly a satisfied pat.

      The truth was Ryder had tried to talk her out of White Christmas at the inn this year.

      The doctor had told them to expect a New Year’s baby. What if they got snowed in, like the year they met?

      But Emma had gotten that mulish look on her face and he’d known there was no sense arguing with her. He’d call a helicopter if they got snowed in. He had his cell phone with him, just in case.

      Besides, there would have been no living with Tess if he had cancelled their yearly Christmas trip to White Pond Inn.

      She was four now, a young lady who knew her own mind. He looked for her—Emma had dressed her in neon pink so they could spot her in the crowds. She was down on the pond, in her new skates, shuffling along between Sue and Peggy. This year, their little sister, born about nine months after Tim had returned home from his tour of duty—was in the sled being pulled behind the girls.

      “Don’t take this the wrong way,” Tim said, following Ryder’s gaze to the four little girls on the pond, “but I hope that’s a boy in there.”

      “Chauvinist,” Emma accused him, but her eyes twinkled with the shine of a woman well-loved.

      “Healthy is good enough for me,” Ryder said.

      He decided, as long as he could keep an eye on Emma and keep her from lifting anything too heavy, it was good to have come to White Pond this year after all.

      She had sold the White Pond Inn to Mona and Tim shortly after she’d agreed to marry Ryder. The younger Fenshaws didn’t run it as a bed-and-breakfast, the inn was now their family home. But every year they held Holiday Happenings, though Mona, Ryder thought thankfully, had renamed it Home for the Holidays. The Christmas Day Dream event had gotten bigger, and it was called Coming Home for Christmas.

      Ryder suspected they kept both activities going mostly for him and Emma.

      Because, as the friendship had grown between the two couples, they’d learned about each other’s histories and heartbreaks. The Fenshaws knew this was always going to be a hard time of year for Ryder, a good time to stay busy, to give to others.

      “You don’t have to,” he’d said to Emma when she had announced she planned to sell. Tim, Jr., wanted the inn not to run as a bed and breakfast, but to farm, as his father farmed, and his grandfather had farmed before that.

      Ryder had not been looking for a brother, just as he had not been looking for love that night a storm had stranded him.

      But in Tim he’d been given a brother anyway.

      “No,” Emma had said firmly, “the house and land need what they have to give. It’s falling down and in need of the kind of repairs Tim can give it and I can’t. Mona has always loved that house. Tim is home now.”

      “If you want it, I’ll fix it up for you as a wedding present.”

      “Ryder,” she said, smiling at him. “You don’t seem to get it. I don’t need it anymore. It was like my dreams, falling down and in need of repair. I wanted White Pond to give me a family, and a feeling of belonging. But I have a better dream now, and I know better than to think a house can make you feel things.”

      And the way she looked at him when she said that made him feel, not ten feet tall and bulletproof, but as if he was enough.

      “Mama, Papa, look at me.”

      Tess’s voice rose high over the sounds of the crowd and he and Emma both turned to look.

      Tess’s pronunciation of Emma had been close to Mama all those years ago. And somehow he had become papa.

      When he showed Tess the pictures of Drew and Tracy, they were Mom and Dad, and he was achingly aware of never wanting to take their place. At the same time he wanted to do a job that would make them so proud of him.

      If Tess’s level of confidence was any indication, he and Emma were doing just fine.

      For a moment, watching Tess strut proudly across the ice, he felt the spirit of it all.

      His brother and sister-in-law.

      Christmas.

      And he believed. He believed that things had a reason.

      Once upon a time, he’d been a man trying to outrun Christmas, finding exactly what he needed en route to where he thought he was going, and had not been going there at all.

      With each year that passed, Ryder was able to see more clearly that the fire had taken things from him. But it had given him things, too.

      It had put him on the road that had led him to Emma. And it had made him a man capable of feeling deeply for others, capable of forgiveness of failings. He was a better man than he had been before, worthy of love.

      That made him wonder, sometimes, if he could find meaning in that, of all things, was there meaning in everything? Even in the things his mind, limited and human, could not grasp?

      He was an architect, trained to think in terms of mathematical precision. But he knew, as an architect, that there was a place where planning and precision left off and inspiration began. Often inspiration came as the result of a problem that seemed insoluble, a hardship that did not seem as if it could be overcome.

      The greatest buildings came from that place.

      And maybe the greatest men and women did, too.

      Look at Lynelle. How could someone like her produce someone like Emma?

      His mother-in-law had chosen not to be a part of their lives at all. She

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