Christmas in the mansion was quiet in the specific, large-house way of a space designed for more people than were currently in it.
Shae had known this would be the case and had not particularly minded it in advance — the holidays had not carried the specific, weighted expectation of warmth and gathering for her since she was six years old, the last Christmas before the accident, the last one that had contained the particular, irreplaceable quality of a family at a table. She had spent eleven Christmases since then in configurations that were loving in their way but structurally different — Gwendolyn's house, then her uncle's, then, at eighteen, her own — and she had made a kind of accommodation with the holiday that involved neither dreading it nor expecting too much from it.
She had dec
