Epilogue

J une came, and with it, Hannah and Levi's daughter—and the end of Tara's paper-thin reasons for sticking around Carrigan's, a place she'd sworn she hated and never wanted to stay longer than a long weekend. When the baby-naming ceremony was over, she was planning to join Holly on the road while studying to take the bar exam in New York and California. From there, she would work part-time with Elijah with the plan to eventually start her own practice (with Lucy) offering pro bono consulting and taking on cases she felt passionate about.

Cole had taken on a new project, helping fund families of trans kids who needed to move to safe states, and Tara and Elijah had their heads together getting him the legal support required. Plus, she and the Advent librarian were fighting book bans all over the county. She was busier than she'd ever been at home, and a hell of a lot happier. She was singing in a cover band that played a standing gig at Ernie's on Friday nights. They weren't very good, and that itself felt like freedom.

Tara had been talking a lot to a new therapist, not only about the fire but also about feeling like she deserved to be free of her family. She'd had a therapist for years, but it was amazing how little you could get out of therapy, if you deliberately chose a therapist who never pushed you to tell the truth.

Now she was waiting for Holly to get here. They'd been apart for three weeks, and it turned out long distance was not Tara's preferred way to have a girlfriend. She was checking her phone for the thousandth time in an hour when the door to the great room opened and the woman in question strolled in. Only a lifetime of debutante training, and the presence of the baby, kept her from leaping into Holly's arms. Her best friend did not, however, have debutante training.

Watching Cole try to be Cole without waking up the sleeping newborn on Levi's chest was hilarious. He was currently pantomiming with his entire giant wingspan, his extreme joy at seeing Holly. There was no good reason he couldn't greet her at a semi-normal volume outside the front door of the inn, but of course, he insisted on doing the most ridiculous thing possible.

The newborn and dad in question were on a chaise longue to which someone (presumably Miriam) had affixed glitter-covered moose antlers. Miriam had her head on Levi's shoulder and was gazing adoringly at her niece. In keeping with Jewish tradition, the child did not have a name yet, would not until the naming ceremony tomorrow. (Tara had received two separate invitations to this ceremony, one from Rachel Rosenstein and one from Felicia Matthews, which called the ceremony two entirely different things, but when she'd asked Miriam the difference, Miriam had just laughed at her.) The baby might not have a name, but she did have lungs that worked, which Tara'd heard for herself. It was to everyone's benefit that she stay asleep.

In obvious opposition to Cole's energy, Levi lifted three fingers from his child's back and wiggled them in a tiny wave.

She texted Holly, who looked down at her phone when it buzzed. She'd sent Hannah would say hi, but every time she gets close enough for the baby to smell milk, she wakes up.

Tara looked over at the very wrinkly potato being gazed at adoringly on her father's chest and felt deeply grateful that she'd chosen not to have children.

Also, her next text said, I'm glad you're here. So is Cole.

She slipped silently off her chair and grabbed Holly's hand, slipping past the entrance to the great room. She waved at Mrs. Matthews in the kitchen, who grinned at her so big, Tara was afraid her face might split. She suspected the Matthewses might be excited about their first granddaughter. Upstairs, they found Hannah huddled in the library with her parents and Noelle.

Hannah hugged Holly hard and said, "I'm so glad you made it! And not just because this one is whiny when she needs to get laid."

Tara gasped in mock indignation, and Holly glowed under the regard of people she'd once thought would never forgive her.

"I wouldn't miss it for the world," Holly said truthfully.

"Okay, I gotta go pump so someone else can feed little girl while I have dinner with you all later," Hannah said. "Hang out with my parents. Or, since Tara said you were staying here for a few days instead of in Lake Placid, I put you in the room you were in last time. Feel free to go break in the new mattress."

"Oh no," Holly said seriously, "we would wake up the baby."

At dinner, Levi raised a glass. "I'm so grateful that you're all here to celebrate our beautiful baby girl. But my siblings and I"—he stopped and gestured for Esther and Joshua to stand up—"would also like to take this opportunity to celebrate our parents, Ben and Felicia Matthews, who are officially retiring at the end of the summer."

Everyone broke into applause. After almost losing the business to bankruptcy when Cass died, it was amazing how the entire team had rallied to make it one of the most sought-after tourist destinations in the Adirondacks. Miriam was painting as much as she was upcycling these days, as she'd always wanted. Noelle's trees were healthy. Levi's show had been renewed for another season.

So now the Matthewses could take a step back and truly leave the Christmasland to the next generation.

"None of us can imagine a Carrigan's without them, and thankfully, they're not going very far, because there's a grandbaby here now," Levi continued, and everyone laughed. "But we're ready to steer this ship of Cass's into the future, and they are ready to sail into a future of quiet Shabbat dinners and no dinner rushes."

Everyone toasted the Matthewses, and then Miriam and Noelle's six months of happy marriage, and then Cole and Sawyer buying a house, and then Tara's new job plans, and then Holly's. Eventually, they'd gotten down to toasting Grant Matthews's most recent lost tooth, and the Green twins finishing first grade, and it was time to go to bed. Holly and Tara did break in the new mattress, as quietly as they could, and the next morning, they all took the baby to synagogue so Rabbi Ruth could bless the sweet, wrinkly potato with a name.

Actually, once Tara got to hold her, she had to admit that she was less weird-looking than Tara's own nieces had been at that age. She already, at a week old, had a head of hair like Miriam's, and Tara thought she might look an awful lot like her aunt Mimi, who in turn was the spitting image of her great-aunt Cass. Though she did, perhaps, have her father's judgmental eyebrows.

Tara knew from Hannah that there'd been some drama between Rachel and Felicia over the baby's name. Levi and Hannah had, initially, considered naming her after Cass's Hebrew name, Rivka, as the first baby born into the family after Cass's death. But Rachel's Sephardic upbringing and Felicia's Ashkenazi one differed on naming traditions, and there had been intense back-and-forth.

As a result, once Levi and Hannah had settled on what they thought her name might be, they hadn't breathed even a word of a hint to anyone. All inquiries as to whether or not she would be called an English name that coincided with her Hebrew name, or given something totally different, were passed off with a smile on Hannah's part or a growling and hissing on Levi's.

At the ceremony, Hannah read from the "Song of Songs" and the baby was given the name Kezia, who was, Cole whispered, a daughter of Job. (Cole knew a weird amount about the Bible for a dude who insisted he definitely for sure never wanted to go to divinity school.)

Because Kezia was also a word for cassia, or cinnamon, and the child's father was, after all, a chef, they gave her another spice for her English name—Clove.

"You've named her after eggnog," Mrs. Matthews pointed out, laughing.

Hannah smiled. "Well, she may have been born in June, but she is a Christmasland baby."

Her cousin, Grant, asked to hold her. Jayla and Jeremiah Green sat on either side of him, like bookends. Tara snapped a picture on an old Polaroid they'd found in Cass's things. On the bottom, she wrote:

The heirs of Cassiopeia

She didn't notice, until Holly pointed it out, that Kringle was peeking over the back of the chair, carefully guarding the next Carrigan's generation.