The Takedown

Chapter 11

11

It’s happening again, the room-fuzzing feeling, like when Gail delivered the news in Stockholm. The tips of my fingers tingle, and there’s a sudden rush of blood to my head. The raccoons and the moose and the deer are closing in around me. What did Nick just say?

He’s peering at me like you might look at a bear in the woods, watching its reaction, determining whether or not it’s about to charge. A dimple pops in his cheek. If what he’s saying is true, then this man... this man has played me. He’s played me even better than I was trying to play him. I work for the government, too.

The words shoot into me like a bullet in slow motion.

“Sydney?” Nick presses, his tone steady, but I already know him better than that. His tells jump out at me like dots on a map. Nothing about him is steady. He licks the seam of his lips because his mouth is drying out. He taps his thumb on the table because he can’t stand sitting still. “I think it would be really good if you said something now.”

I inhale strongly through my nostrils. Oh, I am going to say a lot . And the first thing is, “Are you joking ?” I understand now why Nick’s dragged me to this terrible bar. No witnesses. An open dialogue. Nothing leading back to Johnny or my family. “I swear to god, if you ask me, ‘Do I look like the type of person who’d pull a rubber chicken from my pocket—’?”

Nick squints, thick eyebrows quirked together. “A rubber chicken? Why on earth would I say that?”

“Believe me.” I lift my drink and take an enormous sip, gathering the ice in my mouth and crunching. “I’ve been down this road before. Not this exact road, but the odds of both of us working for the government are—”

“Infinitesimal,” Nick supplies.

“Exactly.” I chew harder, speaking with my mouth half-full. “Run Rudolph Run” switches to “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,” and my goodness, that does not fit the vibe of this conversation. “How do I know you’re telling me the truth? Actually, scratch that. More specific question first. Who do you work for? Which agency?”

“CSIS,” Nick says, no hesitation, but the lump in his throat bobs up and down.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service . The Canadian version of the FBI. So he’s on the other side of the border. Supposedly. “What’s your badge number?”

Nick leans farther across the table, heat pulsing between us. “What is your badge number, Sydney?” When I don’t budge, Nick takes a swig of his own drink. Beer sloshes inside the bottleneck. “Come on, you can’t be annoyed. I’m the one who should be annoyed here. You jump in on my investigation, making me lose valuable time following a possibility that—” He gestures in my direction. “Won’t give me any leads.”

That’s when it clicks. It really, really clicks.

My jaw drops a full inch. “You were trying to seduce me, too.”

It’s not a question. Nick gives me an answer anyway, dark eyes flickering. “I wouldn’t really put it like that...”

“Oh my god.”

“Sydney—”

“Just give me a minute to process that, okay? I’m recovering. I thought there was at least a fifteen percent chance that you were going to try and murder me.” I swallow the last bit of ice. It plunks down cold in the pit of my stomach as I rethink every minor interaction with Nick. That night when we were brushing our teeth, he knocked on the door. He was waiting at the foot of the stairs right before I went running. He asked about the polar plunge, slipping the idea directly into my mind. The back injury! Is he even bruised? Or was that just a ruse for sympathy?

Jesus Christ. Nick isn’t just an exceptional agent; he might be even better than me.

And I’m... starting to look at him a bit differently. This stranger, sitting across the table. When I first saw him, shower water pouring on my head, I assumed he was just dumb muscle. Someone I could easily maneuver into the palm of my hand. The muscle part, that’s still right. But this new image of him straight-up headbutts me like I headbutted Santa.

If Nick really is in CSIS, if I was being calculatedly seduced, too, then he was never a mark. He was always untrustworthy—just in a completely different way than I’d imagined.

You never really know what’s going on in someone else’s head, do you?

“Which parts are the lie, then?” I ask, sorting through all that in my brain. Trying to drop it somewhere that feels safe and manageable. My palms are starting to sweat. “Is Nick your real name?”

He scowls through his natural ease. “Of course it is.”

“How long have you been undercover?”

“Three years,” Nick says. “And I’m sorry if I scared you, but I was trying to feel you out, and this just came out of nowhere. Can you at least tell me who you work for? You realize I just took a big risk blowing my cover on you?”

I do. That doesn’t make total sense, either. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why’d you do that?” I pin him with my eyes, telling myself not to focus on his jaw. Or the curve of his lips. “I could be anyone.”

Nick blows out a frustrated breath. “No, you couldn’t be. For one, there’s my gut feeling. Two, you’re obviously a professional. And three, if you were trying to get information from me, then you must’ve thought I’d lead you to Johnny. CSIS and the FBI have been investigating the Joneses for years, so it wouldn’t surprise me if other organizations were, too. Ergo, someone from the government. Look, I normally don’t carry this, but—” He whips out his badge and slides it low across the table. “I have zero reason to fake my involvement with CSIS.”

I examine the gold CSIS insignia, some things still refusing to add up—like why he’d risk carrying this badge on an undercover mission, around a bunch of criminals who’d put a gun to his head if they found it. Did he bring the badge tonight for my benefit? Was he planning on blowing his cover?

“How is it possible,” I ask, leaning back in my chair, “that we ended up on the same case without knowing about each other? I thought I read about a joint task force. Cross-national interagency collaboration.”

Nick nods once. “You probably did. That’s still in place, but there’ve been a ton of leaks out of the FBI. CSIS doesn’t trust them with this case anymore. We’re keeping things in-house.”

I narrow my eyes at him. “But you trust me?”

“Honestly?” he asks, rasping out a laugh. “Not entirely, but I’d like to. You’re not making it easy right now.”

“Well, I’ve basically just been told that I’ve lost valuable time barking up the wrong tree, and you have to understand...” I cup my drink with both hands. “If you’ve been working on this for three years, this is a tiny blip for you. This is almost one hundred percent of the mission for me.”

“The mission for who?” Nick presses.

What do I have to lose at this point? Almost all of my cards are already on the table. “The FBI,” I say. My eyebrows crowd together. “Do you even like Taylor Swift?”

Nick levels me with a gaze. “That is seriously the question you’re asking me right now?”

“I’m just trying to figure out how much of you is real.” I say this flatly, but it’s sincere. What people say and do are separate, a lot of the time, from what they’re thinking . You can observe someone for years, believe you know them to the core, and they still have this terrible capacity to surprise you.

Just then, the crusty old barkeep toddles over and offers us two drinks on the house. They are frothy, blue, and smell salty like the sea. I trust the taste about as much as I trusted Nick half an hour ago. He must be braver than me, too, because he takes a sip while the barkeep waits.

“It’s good,” he says, straight-faced, swallowing. “Thank you.” When the guy leaves, Nick winces. “He probably thinks this is a date and it isn’t going well.”

“Well, I think it could be going better ,” I say honestly. “So give me a rundown on the timeline here. If it’s been three years, that means you were friends with Johnny first?”

Nick gives a full-body sigh. “That’s complicated. Look, I didn’t choose Johnny as a roommate in college. It was a random assignment. But yeah, at first, we were close. I wasn’t lying to you when I said that. Before I knew the truth, he was a likable guy. Always up to hang out. He introduced me to half my friends on campus, and he also got that I needed to be quiet sometimes. Out on the water, when we were rowing. That sounds like a small thing, but it’s not.” He palms the line of his jaw, grinding his teeth. “Then again, we never talked about anything big. All we did in college was row, study for finals, go out, and play video games. Unless someone was going to write him up for reckless driving in Mario Kart , there wasn’t much of a case against him.”

“You sure?” I push, matching Nick’s expression, eyes narrowed. “You roomed with him for years and you never saw anything suspicious?”

“What, you think I just don’t want to throw him under the bus?”

“This wouldn’t be a bus. It would be more like a small airplane on the way to federal prison.”

Nick guffaws, running a hand through his hair. “You know, you’re a smart-ass, but you’re funny... Okay, the timeline.” He sets his hands down on the table, about a foot apart, like he’s showing me the beginning and the end. “I graduated college with Johnny. Still didn’t know what the Joneses were about. Went back to Canada, took a year, trained for the CSIS in Ottawa. When I turned twenty-four, there was a job opening for a bodyguard.”

“For Johnny,” I clarify.

“Correct,” he says. “My superiors said I should take it. They read me in about the Joneses, who didn’t have much of a profile in Canada at that point, but of course, that was before the heists. I was...” Nick grits his teeth. “I couldn’t believe it. Didn’t take it well. It’s a hard thing to wrap your head around, that someone isn’t who you think they are.”

“Yeah, I can relate to that.” The rest of it is on the tip of my tongue: the tire tracks in the snow; the last sight of my dad in his flannel shirt; his favorite leather boots, which he left in the living room. Never saw it coming. But I don’t know Nick. That’s super clear. Even if he understands what it’s like to catastrophically misunderstand a person, he doesn’t need to hear about any of that. Another small chunk of ice grinds under my teeth. “So you worked your way up to be his head of security, and the rest is history, but I guess I just don’t understand—”

“What’s taking so long?” Nick supplies.

“Exactly. And why you’d agree to inform on him if he was such a great friend. You two still seem pretty close.”

Nick considers this, running his tongue over his teeth. “Johnny runs two separate operations. There’s the legal one and the illegal one. Unfortunately, I landed on the legal side, so it’s not as easy as you’d think to gain intel. Plus, Johnny’s stupidly, stupidly lucky.” He pauses, unreadable, taking a final swig of his lager. “Second question, I’m going to pass... but I also have something that you should know.”

The way he says the last part, I’m absolutely certain I don’t want to know.

Certain that whatever factoid he’s about to produce is going to knock me sideways again.

I hold my breath. “Okay...”

His phone’s still on the table; he grabs it, covertly tapping in the password, and scrolls for a second before spinning the screen around. It’s a picture. Of Calla. Black-and-white. Surveillance photo. There’s a timestamp in the corner.

“What am I looking at here, exactly?” I ask, knowing it’s a dumb question; it’s also the only thing I can get out of my mouth.

Nick inhales deeply, like this is paining him, too. “Calla, on a gas station’s security footage, less than a mile from the scene of the last heist.”

—

Y ou’re pacing , Nick texts me around one thirty in the morning. Of course I am. Wouldn’t he be, if he were in my situation? Through the wall, I hear his mattress squeak as he rolls over. Or leaves the bed. I’m not sure. He types again before I respond: Are you OK?

I stare at the screen, typing back, Fine .

Obviously, not fine. This is a worst-case-scenario-type situation. That 99 percent certainty of Calla’s innocence? The margins are diminishing, and starbursts of pain have started to settle behind my eye sockets. I’m blinking them away. Because still, it... can’t be. I’d know. I know her better than that. I do, even after years of semi-separation.

Right?

Right. Right.

I know her , I repeat like a mantra, pacing again. I know her, I know her, I—

We should finish that conversation , Nick responds.

Immediately after Nick’s bombshell, a few people trudged into the Moose Lodge, and it no longer felt like the safest space to share information. Back in the car, I was still processing, scared that any intelligence I provided from my side might further implicate my sister. Calla... can’t be involved with this. Not willingly. When we were growing up, she told me what she got me for Christmas at least four days before the holiday; she’d burst with the secret. That is not someone who could hide a part in a crime ring. And yet... why was she so close to the scene? What was she doing in Buffalo, New York? Even if she is innocent, it doesn’t paint a good picture. The legal fees she could rack up, trying to work her way out of this...

It makes me nauseated to think about.

That is my sister . My sister in that photo.

At home, Nick and I slunk in through the garage, hoping that no one was awake to ask questions, but I still have questions. About a million and two of them. Luckily, Sal has found his way to a local inn for the night, so all I have to worry about is Johnny hearing. And Gail, who doesn’t know my cover’s blown with Nick. Gail, listening through the walls. I yank on my bunny slippers from high school—seduction mode is over—and shuffle silently out of my room, not even knocking before I turn the handle and glide into his.

Nick’s stretched out on Calla’s old twin bed, his white-socked feet sticking off the end. He’s in roughly the same pajamas as he was during our toothpaste talk: black sweatpants, black T-shirt, but I’m noticing him a lot more. The clinginess of the fabric. Ripples down his shirt. He jolts like he was half asleep—or like I’ve snuck up on him in the shower again.

“Jesus, will you stop doing that?” he asks in a whisper. I barely hear him over the noise. The loud, loud... frogs? Rainforest tree frogs. A sound machine blares in the corner, melodious ribbits hopping across the room.

“Sorry,” I whisper back. “I didn’t want to risk knocking.”

He swings his feet off the bed, stands up, and paces closer to me. “Finish the conversation?”

I grab him gently by the elbow, leading him over to the frogs in the corner—and turning up the volume as high as it’ll go. Electronic sound barrier. Much more effective than shower water. “Tell me where you think the next heist is. Any leads?”

“Some,” Nick says, close to me. So close. I crick my neck up to look at him. “I know when it’s going to happen. Christmas Day. Vinny canceled the New Year’s Eve party; said we didn’t need it now that there’s a wedding, and that was a big clue. They like to use events as alibis. Charity functions. Book clubs.”

I frown. “Who’s in a book club?”

“Oh, all of them,” Nick says. “Murder mystery.”

“You’re kidding,” I say.

“No, Johnny’s full of surprises. Like, he actually loved that pottery course. Even though he was there for an alibi.”

I shake my head, voice lowering to a whisper again. “Okay, okay, keep going.”

Now it’s Nick’s turn to frown. “Vinny said something last week. He was drunk, and he was going on and on about explosives. All the things you could and couldn’t buy on the black market. And he was talking about how smart Johnny is, and how he has ‘big plans’ for the end of the year.”

Tension settles over the bridge of my nose. “You know they have fifty pounds of C4, right?”

Nick pales. “ And the grenades?”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“That’s what our chatter picked up,” Nick says, wiping a hand down his face. “But I guess we missed something. Looks like their next heist is going to blow the rest of them out of the water. I pressed him on it, hard, but by the end of it he was slurring his words and just passed out on the couch.”

I swallow, nod. “But Vinny’s in the loop?”

“I think he’s a third in the loop. Doesn’t know everything but knows enough. Haven’t gotten the chance to speak with him, because he’s been traveling—but I thought we could both press him tomorrow at the bachelor party. Or bachelorette party. Bachelor-meets-bachelorette party.” Nick’s gaze flicks over my face. “If you want to work together.”

I waver, shifting in my bunny slippers. “I’ll work with you if you leave Calla out of it. I know what you showed me, but I still don’t want to believe that she’d—”

Creak.

The slightest creak. Down the hallway. A door whispering open. Footsteps, a man’s tread. It’s probably louder than he expects it to be, and I can feel it more than I can hear it: a reverberation over the floorboards. I know this house. And Nick senses it, too—how, in the next three seconds, someone could wrench open the bedroom door, and we’d be here, after my takedown on stage, discussing something. Nick and me, the two of us, alone at almost two in the morning.

Bad optics.

New plan.

It happens in an instant, before we even discuss anything, before we have time to whisper or lock eyes. Nick just knows—exactly what I’m thinking, exactly what we should do. A perfect cover-up requires far fewer clothes. I still don’t trust Nick. How could I, after all the deception? But I do trust our mutual idea. Instinctively, I whip off my shirt while Nick peels off his, and then we’re clashing. His hands find my hair. My hands find his jaw. The lace of my bra presses against the firmness of his chest, and he pulls me closer, lips claiming mine. When I open my mouth, his tongue sweeps in—so different than at the beach, more feverish, hungrier...

And something inside me moans as loud as it rebels. Underneath my confidence, underneath the cover-up, is something feverish that I can’t quite control. People might surprise you in bad ways, but on the flip side, I guess there’s this: a dangerous flutter in my belly, warmth climbing, and—

Nick is... actually kind of hot, isn’t he?

The handle clicks open.

Johnny. Here’s Johnny.

“Oh, I’m sorry ,” he says, coming up short on the bedroom rug. The sorry doesn’t sound genuine, at all, but Nick and I explode apart, caught in the act, embarrassed, mortified. From what Johnny’s witnessing, it seems like we are super turned on by the sound of tree frogs. My cheeks are flushed. My chest is spiked with little spots of red. I’m acting, I’m acting, I’m acting , remember?

I fish for my shirt on the floor, whipping it up, and covering my chest.

Nick clears his throat, a little overheated himself. “Yeah?”

“Heard you were up,” Johnny says. “Just wanted to go over some last-minute plans for the boat party, but I see you’re... occupied.” He gives me a hideous once-over, gaze falling over me like a cold splash of water. “We can talk in the morning, hey, Nicky boy?”

“Night then,” Nick says, faux-embarrassed, giving Johnny a short wave.

The door clicks closed again.

And then I’m just standing there, my chest rising and falling, watching Nick’s chest rising and falling—

“I’ll go, too,” I say over the rainforest sounds. “See you tomorrow.”

The remainder of my questions will have to wait until the next time we’re alone. On the drive up to the bachelor-meets-bachelorette party tomorrow? That’ll do.

“Yeah,” Nick says with a clear of his throat, adjusting the waistband of his sweatpants. “Yeah, tomorrow.”

—

Nick,” I say, downstairs the next morning, by the coffeepot.

“Sydney,” he responds, matching my let’s-not-talk-about-it undertones. Being my agent self and my at-home self is hard enough without... this. Whatever this is.

Nick swigs a too-hot sip of his black coffee, filtering it through his teeth. Automatically, I match him, burning the tip of my tongue. An uncomfortable level of tension pulses between us, and I wonder if he’s thinking about the press of his lips against my—

“I still can’t get over it, Sydney,” Calla says. She’s sipping her coffee at the breakfast table, shaking her head; she seems to have recovered from our little squabble yesterday, seems to have shoved the dad talk back into a dark drawer, where it belongs. “You took that guy down . In a donkey costume.” A teaspoon of sugar plunks into her mug. “I bet that’s up on YouTube by now.”

My nose scrunches. How long before the FBI wipes it from the web?

“Good coffee,” Nick says with a lift of his cup, changing the subject.

After breakfast, Grandma Ruby flutters around the kitchen like a moth, spurting out plans. If there’s going to be a wedding at the house, we need additional fresh Christmas trees. “For the greenery,” she says, fishing out a spool of ribbon from one of the cabinets. “Maybe we can place them at the altar? Ooo, wouldn’t that be pretty for the pictures?” I gulp another mouthful of coffee before I say something stupid, like, This wedding is about as good of an idea as filling a bunch of trash bags with gasoline, tossing them in the Prius, and then lighting a match on the way home.

We take two cars.

I ride with Nick, Johnny, and Calla in the rented Escalade. When I slide into the back seat, memories from last night crash into me—the glove box, empty of weaponry; the line in Nick’s forehead as he accused me of the truth; the crush of his lips against mine—and soon we’re setting off with a tire screech in the snow. As with everything else, Johnny’s competitive behind the wheel—and he’s an atrocious driver. Turn signals? What turn signals! Stoplights? Merely a suggestion. Pedestrians? Never heard of them! Even if you have tinted windows , I want to say, people can still see you being an asshole.

“Hey, learn to drive, will ya?” he shouts... at a cyclist. Calla winces. Which is promising. She must notice, at some level, that Johnny isn’t the nicest guy?

By the time we arrive at Cape Hathaway Christmas Tree Farm, just over the river on the other side of town, the parking lot is jam packed, and the sky is a cloudless gray. Grandma Ruby took us here the first winter after Dad left. Said we could pick out any tree we wanted. No sadness, no distractions, just acres and acres of Christmas trees. The scent is amazing.

Almost smells like Nick’s soap.

Sydney, for fuck’s sake. Do not think about Nick’s soap.

From a man in a tiny wooden shed, Calla rents a handsaw for the tree takedown, then sidles up by my shoulder. “Remember the last time we came here?” she asks me, glistening metal dangling from her hand. “We picked out that Charlie Brown tree and it didn’t have any needles by Christmas.”

“Oh, I remember,” I say, trying to keep myself in the moment. “Sweetie Pie was terrified of it. And Grandma Ruby chucked it away as soon as all the presents were gone. Poor skeleton tree...”

By the farmstand, Nick laughs at something Johnny’s just said.

Calla catches me staring. Eyes bright, she nudges me with her shoulder. “How’d the date go?”

She says it in a merry way that lets me know that she absolutely heard about my late-night meeting with Nick. I keep my voice light. “It was good. We got drinks.”

“That’s really nice to hear. I know you wanted that date even after everything that happened at the pageant, which Grandma Ruby and I thought was... a little strange actually, but...” Calla frowns. “Are you seeing anyone back in DC?”

“No, why?”

Calla shrugs. “No reason really, it’s just... Do you realize that I haven’t met anyone you’ve dated since high school? I couldn’t even pick your type out of a lineup.”

Out of a lineup. Hopefully my type would not be behind bars at a police station. Then again, my usual type isn’t that healthy, either: guys who hardly want to know me at all. In college and after, whenever the relationship got too deep, I bailed. It’s one thing for a guy to leave you if he doesn’t know who you are; you can explain it away to yourself. You can say, He didn’t know what he was missing . It’s another if they understand your quirks, your idiosyncrasies, and leave you anyway.

The safest type of flirtation is a fake one. Maybe that’s why I’m... minorly drawn to Nick. It’s nothing real, never was, never will be.

“No, it’s not that,” I say.

“Are you on the apps?” Calla asks.

I shake my head. “Nope.”

“Can I make you a profile?”

Just then, Johnny’s boots crunch in the snow as he approaches us, hand outstretched. “I can take that, babe,” he says, prizing the saw from Calla’s hand.

Internally, I scowl, thinking of the way his gaze slid over me last night—and how now, he’s just so patronizing . Calla is a twenty-five-year-old woman. She can handle a saw. She could handle a flamethrower if she wanted.

“Know what?” I mumble. “I’m going to get another saw.”

Technically speaking, the rule is one handsaw per family, but I pay the guy twenty bucks and promise to have the second one back in an hour. When I try to pass the saw to Calla, she balks. “Nah, I’m fine. You take it. You’re better at this stuff anyway.”

“No, you should—”

“It’s fine ,” she says, even though it isn’t. “I know what you’re thinking, and you shouldn’t. I can cut down a tree, and I like cutting down my own Christmas tree, but if Johnny wants to do it... It’s okay. Sometimes you have to sacrifice things in relationships.”

“Yeah,” I fire back, blunt, “like how many ceramic dogs you have on your mutual dresser. Not things like your ability to express competence.”

She pokes her tongue into her cheek. “Just, please?”

“Or how many cats you have,” I add, “if your partner is allergic to cats.”

“All I’m saying,” Calla adds, “is that it’s a balancing act.”

I suck my teeth. “And what else is he asking you to balance? Next thing you know, he’s...” Asking you to lie for him. Steal for him. Commit armed robbery for him. “Asking you to quit your job.”

Calla’s eyes widen almost imperceptibly. There’s a flicker at the center of her pupils.

“Calla...” I say, breathing slowly through my nose. “Did he ask you to quit your job?”

“It’s not like it sounds.”

“It sounds like he’s asked you to quit your job.”

“He just knows how much it stresses me out sometimes,” Calla protests, voice dropping to a sharp whisper. “And I won’t need a salary after we get married, not financially speaking, and... maybe I’m not explaining myself well. I’m not sure this is a productive conversation.”

“I don’t think the problem is you , Calla,” I say, but she’s already stalking off with a quiet “Be nice.”

And oh, I will be. I’ll be so, so nice.

We find two perfect specimens on the corner of the lot, one next to the other. Grandma Ruby’s cornered them like a hawk with prey, shooing away other potential customers. Johnny announces that he’s got the Norwegian fir on the left. Saw in hand, he makes the first cut—

And I immediately start on the Christmas tree to the right, slicing into the trunk with a jagged swipe. I arch. I bend. I’m remembering how he tried to knock past me on the run; how he tried to dig under my skin about Calla getting married first. Competitiveness practically oozes from Johnny’s pores.

I can’t take him down yet. Not fully. But I can knock him down a peg.

Johnny sees me pick up the pace out of the corner of his eye.

I think a part of him knows that it is on .

Really cheery music plays in the background; gaggles of kids cavort through rows of pristinely green trees. But make no mistake. This has become a spontaneous battle. My saw slices back and forth, its toothy ridges biting into the base—and Johnny’s does the same. Beads of sweat are forming under my black beanie. His curly hair is bouncing in the sunlight.

Back, forth, back, forth, back . It’s a symphony of sawing. An orchestra of aggression. I want to make Johnny wheeze with effort.

I hear Grandma Ruby say to Nick, “This is much more intense than I’d anticipated. I haven’t seen this much tension since bingo at the Moose Lodge.”

Johnny steals a glance at me. I see it in my peripheral vision. I’m ahead of him by a good two strokes. Can’t hack it? a part of me cackles. That’s so sad for you.

My boots sink farther and farther into the snow. My mittens tighten on the handle.

With a satisfying crack, my tree falls first.

—

Fresh snowflakes dust our shoulders as we shuffle back indoors, lugging two Christmas trees into the living room. At the sound of the trees thudding by the couch, Sweetie Pie tucks her tail all the way between her legs. Before I can reach over to comfort her, Nick does. His hands travel to her ears, massaging with a “Shhh, it’s okay, it’s all right,” and I concede that—fine, yes—he is good with her.

But I’d like to stop noticing good things about him.

Especially since the boat party’s tonight. We have to stay focused and probe Vinny for intel.

In a flash, Calla disappears into the attic and comes down quickly with a box of old ornaments, picking through the plastic and unwrapping a few. “Awwww, Syd, look at this one.” She’s holding up Sweetie Pie’s paw print, from when she was a puppy. Heart legitimately warming, I scooch over to her and take a deeper peek inside the box. There’s my sixth-grade woodshop assignment: a tiny Christmas nutcracker with a green feather plume. There’s Calla’s first-grade reindeer made out of a red lightbulb and cardboard antlers, along with Great-Grandma Pearl’s handmade lace snowflakes; the woman went ice fishing until she was ninety-seven years old and lived by herself in a one-room cabin—which she built—like a total bad-ass.

“Noooo,” Calla says, pulling out a picture ornament. “Remember when you had a mullet?”

I laugh out loud, examining the miniature framed portrait of young Sydney, who was missing her two front teeth. “The worst thing is, I requested that haircut.” From Dad. I remember that part as well. In the backyard, a September day, leaves falling on our shoulders. “I mean, I didn’t say ‘Give me a mullet,’ but I accidentally described a mullet.”

Calla turns to Nick. “Want to see?”

“He does not,” I say.

“He does,” Nick says, and then proceeds to smile in a broad, lazy way. “Would it make you feel better if I told you that elementary school Nick wanted to bleach the tips of his hair?”

I pause, eyebrow arching. “Yes.”

After the trees are erected in front of the living room window, right where the ceremony will (or will not ) take place, Grandma Ruby throws a few logs into the fireplace, newspaper sizzling and disappearing beneath the burgeoning flames. Then she suggests, since we’re all gathered around anyway, we should do our Christmas games night. Or rather, games midafternoon. The schedule has gone the way of everything else this holiday: It’s completely shredded.

Grandma Ruby appoints herself master of ceremonies.

Johnny snags Calla, wrangling her into a gentle—but pointed—headlock.

I’m with Sidekick Nick. Probably should stop calling him that.

“You know, I saw this post about male reindeer,” Calla says, legs crossed on the living room carpet. She’s wiggled out of the headlock, a little flustered, and has forgone her parka for a thick, puffy sweater and even thicker socks. It reminds me of the old days when we were sweatshirt people at Christmas. When we’d spend whole afternoons lounging on the couch, stringing together popcorn garlands and watching all the Home Alone movies. “They don’t have any antlers in the winter, whereas the females not only grow antlers, but also keep them year-round. Which means, if all those illustrations are correct, that women pull Santa’s sleigh.”

“Figures,” Grandma Ruby muses with a click of her tongue. “Men can’t even find pickle jars in the refrigerator. How’re they going to find all those houses?” She turns, force-feeding Johnny. “More cookies?”

“Oh, thanks,” he says, “but I’m stuffed. I think that four sugar cookies is my limit.”

“Nonsense!” I say, loading another one onto his plate—and then onto mine. I take a bite and pray for Scrabble. A nice, calm Scrabble competition in which I E-V-I-S-C-E-R-A-T-E Johnny in a triple-word-score fashion. On top of everything else, he wants Calla to quit her job ?

Johnny does the honors, riffling around inside a winter hat, stuffed to the brim with board game options. Grandma Ruby’s scrawled them all on tiny white slips of paper.

At this point it feels like Russian roulette.

“Let’s see...” Johnny says, really milking this. With a flourish, he selects a paper from the very bottom. It reads: Pictionary.

That’s safe. Nothing is safer than Pictionary.

From the garage, Grandma Ruby wheels in a standing board with giant sheets of paper, and Calla grabs a tub full of markers. Nick and I are up first.

When Johnny mouths a taunting “Good luck,” I don’t let it rile me. I let it fuel me. My team is going to smoke him.

With cupped hands, Grandma Ruby whispers the prompt into my ear. It’s easy. It’s SpongeBob . We can win with that one. Calla starts the clock, Nick leans forward on the couch, and I race to the board, marker squealing as I draw a quick rectangle and fill it with tiny circles, cartoon eyes, bucked teeth, and trousers.

“Cheese,” Nick guesses.

Calla side-eyes him. I’m no Michelangelo, but my drawing is clearly not cheese. What kind of cheese has square pants? Giving Nick the benefit of the doubt, I add legs, rounded feet, and arrows pointing to the holes in the sponge.

“Twenty seconds,” Grandma Ruby says.

“Sandwich,” Nick says.

I scribble furiously with my black marker, illustrating SpongeBob’s environment: a spiky, ovular pineapple; Patrick Star; bubbles in the sea. I even draw the sea, a wave over SpongeBob’s spongy head. Nick is either guessing wrong to annoy me (why would he do that?), or he lived in complete isolation in the early 2000s. He says, “Ocean.” He says, “Starfish.” But he does not say fucking SpongeBob .

“Five seconds,” Grandma Ruby says.

I passive-aggressively recircle the image, over and over again, until it looks like I’m representing a black hole. When the timer goes off with an evil little buzz, I spin around. “ He lives in a pineapple under the sea, Nick! He lives in a pineapple. Under the sea.”