Chapter 9
nine
. . .
Holly
I stood in the entryway of my sad little house and watched through the window as Luke’s SUV disappeared down the street. Part of me wanted to run after him, to tell him to come back, that we could figure this out together.
But I didn’t.
I needed time to think without Luke watching me with that quiet, unwavering attention, without the memory of his hands on my body, his mouth on my skin, or the way he’d whispered my name like the answer to every question he’d ever pondered, clouding my judgment.
I gathered all the blankets I’d piled on my bed the day before and dragged them to the couch and burrowed in until only my face was exposed while I tried to process everything.
Luke had built me a profile—without asking. He’d combed through my life online and fed what he’d curated into his app like I was a data set instead of a person, and then ran it against his own to determine our compatibility, which was, by his own admission, completely off the charts.
For a week, he’d known that we were mathematical soulmates while I’d been stumbling and fumbling through each of our interactions, trying to figure out if what I was feeling was legitimate or if I was projecting my desperate need for connection onto the first decent guy who’d shown interest in me since my humiliating breakup.
As if this wasn’t mind-boggling enough, in the middle of his confession, he’d told me he loved me. Just blurted it out.
I pulled the blankets tighter around myself, but I still couldn’t stop shivering, and it didn’t have much to do with the temperature.
Did he really love me? Or did he love what his algorithm told him he should love?
And how was I supposed to know the difference?
He’d made decisions about us, about pursuing me, based on something I’d never consented to. Every conversation we’d had, every moment we’d shared, he’d known something I didn’t.
That wasn’t fair, and it certainly wasn’t right.
But underneath my anger was something else. Something that felt uncomfortably like understanding.
Because while I hadn’t known this man for long, I did know him.
I’d wager that I probably knew him better than anyone else in Mistletoe Bay, save perhaps his cousin, Nathan.
I knew that Luke approached everything in life like a problem to be solved.
That was just who he was—analytical, methodical, and desperate to get things right.
So, it made perfect sense that he’d turn to the algorithm he’d created to obtain mathematical proof that what he was feeling wasn’t just wishful thinking.
It was invasive and wrong and also … stupidly sweet?
God, I was a mess.
I pulled my phone out and checked the time, my thumb hovering over my best friend’s name.
But what would I even say to her? The truth was, long conversations where we laid our hearts bare weren’t what our relationship was about these days.
If I was being completely honest with myself, we didn’t actually have much of a relationship at all anymore.
Logically, I understood why she’d chosen to be Switzerland about Eric and me—her brother had married Eric’s brother, after all.
But it had hurt. Badly. I’d been her best friend for twenty years.
That was supposed to count for something.
Instead, she’d made me feel like a situation—a ticking time bomb—that needed to be handled with care.
And now that she was living in Barcelona, her calls and texts had grown less frequent until our friendship felt more like polite acquaintances whose Instagram posts you liked without comment.
No. I couldn’t call her. Not about this.
But I desperately needed to talk through my confused, jumbled thoughts about life and love and why I was so torn up about Luke with someone. Because I was self-aware enough to realize that my difficulty accepting him at his word wasn’t really about him.
Well, not entirely.
It was about men lying to me. Telling what I wanted to hear—or what they thought I wanted to hear—and then breaking my heart.
Eric had told me he loved me right up until I was standing in that church, waiting for the wedding march to begin and those heavy double doors to open, when in reality he’d been in love with someone else the entire time.
The landlord who bought the building that housed my floral shop had assured me nothing would change with my lease. Four months later, he tripled my rent. Two months after that, he kicked me out entirely.
Men lied.
That was the story of my life.
So was Luke just the latest chapter?
Except … Luke hadn’t lied. Not exactly. He’d … delayed telling me a difficult truth. That wasn’t the same thing.
Was it?
My phone buzzed. I pulled it out, irrationally hoping it might be him, but it was just a notification from the power company estimating service restoration by six o’clock instead of tomorrow morning as initially predicted.
At least I wouldn’t freeze to death overnight.
Small victories.
I set the phone down and pulled the blankets tighter, trying to will my brain to stop its endless loop because I’d been sitting here for over an hour, and I was no closer to an answer than when Luke had dropped me off.
I needed help. I needed someone who knew me, who’d seen me at my worst, who could tell me if I was being rational or if I was sabotaging something good because I was too scared to trust again.
My thumb hovered over Mom’s name, my emotions conflicted.
She had left me here in Mistletoe Bay, alone.
Had broken her promise to stay. But she’d never lied to me about why.
In fact, she'd been heartbreakingly honest in telling me that my dad’s health was the only thing that mattered to her.
My mom understood love and commitment. She understood hard decisions and sacrifice.
If anyone could help me untangle this mess, it was her.
I hit call before I could talk myself out of it.
She answered on the second ring. “Sweetheart! How are you? We heard all about the ice storm. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Well, physically fine. The house is freezing because the power’s out, but I’ve got blankets.” I paused, chewing on my lip for a moment, weighing how best to bring this up. “Is now a good time, because I really need to talk to you about something important?”
Her tone shifted immediately from cheerful to concerned. “Of course it is. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong, exactly. It’s just …” I pulled a deep breath into my lungs. “I actually met someone.”
“That’s wonderful!” I could hear the smile in her voice when she spoke. “Tell me all about him.”
“His name is Luke. He’s the one I was paired with for the Candlelight Walk. He bought that big Federal on Elm Street—the one that was falling apart?”
“The Crossmore House? I remember reading about the sale. Some tech billionaire, right?”
“That’s him.” I stood and started pacing, a quilt trailing behind me like a cape.
“And he’s … Mom, he’s wonderful. He’s brilliant and awkward and he drove through the storm yesterday because he was worried about me.
And last night we …” I trailed off, feeling my face heat even though she couldn’t see me.
“Oh, honey, you slept with him,” she said, her voice taking on that particular tone that often scandalized my grandmother, her mother-in-law.
My mom had always been unapologetically sex-positive, a second-wave feminist who’d spent my teenage years ranting about how the patriarchy used shame and purity culture to keep women down.
“Yeah.” I stopped pacing and closed my eyes, bringing up images of my night with Luke in my mind. “And it was incredible. Like, embarrassingly good. And afterward, he told me he loved me.”
“That’s … that’s fast.”
My mom, bless her heart, had zero issues with a one-night stand. But love? That was more complicated.
I opened my eyes and moved to the window, staring out at the frozen neighborhood.
“I know it might seem that way. We’ve only known each other for a couple of weeks.
But Mom, it doesn’t feel fast. It feels like …
” I struggled to find the words to match my feelings, settling simply on: “It feels right. Or it did, until this morning.”
“What happened this morning?”
So I told her—about how we met, how we’d grown close, about the dinner at Rosa’s, kissing him on my front porch, about the dating app Luke had built, about the algorithm’s startling accuracy, about how he’d run our profiles and discovered we were a 98.
7 percent match—so high it’d made him look for a glitch in his code.
And then, when there wasn’t one, how he’d kept that information from me for days.
When I finished, there was a long silence on the other end of the line.
“Mom?”
“I’m here. I’m just processing.” I heard the scrape of a stool leg against tile, followed by the distant bark of their dog.
“Hush, Biscuit,” Mom said, her voice muffled like she’d covered the phone.
Then, clearer: “So let me see if I understand correctly. This man, this Luke, told you he loves you, and you’re what—sitting there in your freezing house trying to talk yourself out of believing him? ”
I blinked at her bluntness. “It’s not that simple.”
“Isn’t it? Holly, what did you tell me about Eric?”
I thought back to the many days I’d stayed holed up in my parents’ house—in my childhood bed—crying and raving about how I’d given that man my youth and all I got in return was a shitty t-shirt that read “bride” in pink rhinestones.
“I said a lot of things, Mom.”
“You did, but the one that stuck with me was that you never saw it coming.” You said he’d been lying to you for years, Holly. Years.”
I had to swallow twice before I could speak. “I know, but—”
“This man is telling you exactly how he feels, emptying his proverbial closet of all its skeletons from the beginning, and you’re inventing reasons not to trust him.”
Ouch. I’d wanted honesty, but that didn’t mean the truth didn’t also sting. I felt myself getting defensive.
“Luke lied to me, Mom. He kept this huge thing from me.”