Chapter Two
Ivy hated flying.
Not in the same way as most people who said they hated flying, because turbulence rocked her to sleep. But if she wasn’t being paid, she didn’t like being on a plane.
So maybe it was more accurate to say that Ivy hated being a passenger.
It was the entire process. The backward math to decide when to get to the airport, wondering what the security line would be like, unsure if she remembered to empty her water bottle, stressing about whether it mattered that she hadn’t put her liquids into a quart-size bag.
Would it have been easier to just wear her damn uniform so she didn’t have to think about any of that?
One of Ivy’s most vivid memories of training was when someone had asked their most senior instructor about her favorite place to go on her days off.
The woman, who’d been with the airline for more than thirty years, drew up a sigh from the depths of her weary soul and said, “Nowhere near the airport.” Ivy hadn’t understood her answer back then.
Why didn’t she want to go anywhere? What was the point of having flight benefits if you didn’t use them?
Her first few years, she’d squeezed as much travel into her days off as she could, exploring the world with the intense excitement that only someone from a small Midwest town could.
She still had some coworkers who did a ton of personal travel, but Ivy had finally been able to admit that she was, at her core, a homebody.
Too bad she didn’t like her home.
“Last name Weaver, please come to the podium. Last name Weaver.”
Ivy stood and went to the ticket counter. The less-than-enthused gate agent checked her ID badge and handed her a ticket.
“Sorry it’s in the back, but I did get you your own row.”
“Just happy to have a seat,” Ivy said with an overly bright smile. She got the smallest twitch of a smile in return.
She took a picture of her ticket with her phone.
Ivy: Got a seat to Milwaukee! See you in about three hours.
Mom: Can’t wait!
Dad: *dancing cat gif*
She also sent the picture to Brad.
Ivy: Guess I have to go
Brad: If you need me to be the Rupert to your Julia, I will be there as soon as I can. I could pass for straight, right?
Ivy: Only if you change everything wonderful about you. But don’t be surprised if you get an SOS
Brad: Consider me on standby
The agent began the boarding process. Ivy watched in baffled fascination as people who were not part of the boarding group being called crowded the gate area.
They all had assigned seats. Theoretically, there was enough room for everyone’s bags.
Why did people do this? It was a part of flying she didn’t usually have to witness because when she was working, she was already on the plane, wondering if it was the passengers’ first day on Earth.
Basic human functions, like moving forward in a single-file line, seemed like unknowable rituals from a faraway land.
But the special hell of an antsy crowd herding toward the gate like cattle was another thing entirely.
Whatever gate agents were paid, it wasn’t enough.
Ivy got up when her group—the last group—was called.
She had to stash her suitcase in first class because that was the only spot available.
At least one of them could ride in style.
But her row in the back of the plane was blissfully people-free, and she tossed her bulky winter coat over the free seats so no one got any ideas about becoming her neighbor.
It took her no time at all to put on her headphones and connect to the onboard entertainment system.
She never got to peruse the movie offerings when she was at work, and the amount of choice was overwhelming.
By the time she picked a movie, they’d be landing.
No wonder people stared at her blankly when she showed up at their row with the beverage cart.
Their decision-making skills were already tapped out.
The Muppet Christmas Carol was her salvation.
The summer she worked at the movie theater, they’d done a Christmas in July promotion where they showed holiday movies on July 25th.
It was the kind of silly thing her small town loved.
Grant had gone full Kringle, trading his uniform for a Santa costume that was too big for him.
And during the concessions rush before The Muppet Christmas Carol, he had dropped his red hat on her head.
He’d tickled her nose with the pom-pom on the end, flipped the long tail from side to side, and had been a general menace.
When she tried to give the hat back, he told her to keep it because it looked better on her.
Ivy remembered rolling her eyes, because there wasn’t a singular item in the entire universe that would look better on her than on Grant Underwood.
The whole family was unfairly good-looking, but Austin and Grant were something else.
It was hard to reconcile that warm memory of Grant with the way he’d turned on her a month later and broken her heart.
She’d never been able to bring herself to tell her parents what had happened that night, because Mom was best friends with Mrs. Underwood.
That also meant that over the years, she’d heard stuff about Grant’s life against her will—information passed from Grace to Mom and Mom to Ivy.
Like how Grant still lived in Coeur-de-Lac and worked for his dad’s construction company.
There had been a few semiserious girlfriends over the years, but he was currently single.
Whenever her mother passed along the Underwood rundown, Ivy wondered what Mrs. Underwood told her offspring about Ivy. Did they know about her job? All of her moves?
Did Grant feel some twinge of regret?
Did Austin wonder what he’d missed out on?
Her stomach lurched as the plane shot forward down the runway.
Normally, she was ready for the sudden acceleration, but she’d been lost in Underwood la-la land.
She had to cut that out, because odds were good they didn’t think about her at all.
Or if they did, it was in the context of the old her.
Shy, awkward, with obscenely frizzy hair.
Ivy had rebuilt herself brick by fucking brick.
Her curly hair routine alone had cost hundreds of dollars of trial and error, but the soft, bouncy, defined results spoke for themselves.
Had she remembered to pack her silk pillowcase?
The plane jostled and bounced as they climbed, and Ivy let the familiarity of rough winter air soothe her.
If this really was going to be her last time in Coeur-de-Lac—her last Christmas in that magical winter wonderland—she was going to enjoy it. No boy with the last name Underwood was going to ruin that for her.
Ivy loved an airport at Christmas, especially at arrivals.
It was the time of year when people parked their cars and waited inside for loved ones they hadn’t seen in a long time.
There were more flowers, more signs, more balloons.
And, despite her telling him to just pull up to the curb so she could dive inside like a secret agent, Dr. Paul Weaver was waiting for her in the terminal, complete with flowers, balloons, and a sign that said, Welcome Home, Bunny.
“Someone is going to think you’re picking up an over-the-hill stripper,” Ivy said, blinking back tears as she and her dad tried to break each other’s ribs with their hugs.
“Is that not what you do?”
“I’d make so, so much more money.”
“But you can’t dance.”
Ivy groaned so she wouldn’t laugh. Laughing only encouraged him.
“Did you get shorter in the last six months?” she teased, measuring herself against him with her hand.
“It’s entirely possible. I’m getting old. I’m retiring.” The last word sounded like it tasted bad in his mouth.
“What are you going to do with all your tweed?”
Her dad was famous on campus for his extensive collection of tweed suit jackets. When he’d gotten his doctorate in English literature, he’d really leaned into the aesthetic.
“Wear it to the grocery store, I guess.” Her dad shrugged and reached for her carry-on. “Is this all you brought?”
“No. I checked a big bag, too.”
“I thought flight attendants were supposed to be expert packers.”
“You’d think so, but we actually suck at it.”
Every flight attendant she knew, except for the extreme germaphobes, never fully unpacked their suitcase. Items rotated out as needed for laundry or weather, but it was too much work to pack and unpack every week. Ivy owned suitcase-exclusive extras of most items she used every day.
“If you grab the car, I can grab my bag and we can get to Culver’s sooner,” Ivy suggested. Whenever she was in the Midwest, she needed a ButterBurger and a custard shake as soon as humanly possible.
“I see where your priorities are,” her dad teased with a twinkle in his eyes. “I shall bring around the coach, m’lady.”
He left with her carry-on, balloons, sign, and flowers, and an ache bloomed in Ivy’s chest, like her body was finally admitting how much she missed her parents. The missing got easier the longer she went without seeing them, because she could forget how wonderful it was to be around them.
Ivy walked through baggage claim until she found her flight on carousel number three, which was sharing the space with a flight from Los Angeles. That had to be a seasonal offering, because she couldn’t imagine there being a lot of demand to leave sunny California for frozen Wisconsin.
The group surrounding the carousel was a mix of families—parents with tight, stressed expressions and kids running circles around them, trying to climb on the luggage carousel—single travelers furtively glancing at their phones, and those whose loved ones had come inside like her dad, clinging to each other, smiling and hugging.
A man wearing a baseball hat and sunglasses caught her eye.
Who the hell wore a baseball hat and sunglasses inside, besides celebrities and people up to no good?
Then her gaze shifted to the young woman standing next to him in a UCLA sweatshirt.
She was grinning at him with the kind of unhinged mischief that reminded her of Piper Underwood.
Wait. That was Piper Underwood. No longer a gangly limbed kid but a grown woman. Which meant Mr. Mysterious had to be…
Austin.
Ivy’s stomach flipped and her heart pounded like a bass drum in her ears. He was there, so close she could have shouted and he would have heard her. They were in the same place. They were going to the same place.
Maybe Christmas in Coeur-de-Lac wouldn’t be so lonely after all.
A man walked up and stood beside Austin, giving Piper a suspicious frown. Dark jeans, a green flannel, and a brown Carhartt jacket. He definitely looked local. Actually, he looked how Austin tried to look on his TV show.
Piper said something to him and the man smiled, making Ivy’s entire body flush.
That smile.
She knew that smile.
Grant Underwood.
Ivy dove behind a large metal pillar, flattening herself against the cold surface. So much for being calm, aloof, and unaffected when she saw him again.
He hadn’t seen her. He couldn’t have seen her.
Fuck.
How the hell was she supposed to get her bag without him noticing?
This wasn’t how she wanted Grant to see her for the first time in a decade.
For that, she had to be devastating. She had to look exactly like the kind of woman Austin would notice, so she could prove his older brother wrong.
No makeup and leggings was not the vibe.
Velvet or silk was more appropriate. Something decadent that would have Grant saying it would look better on his floor—that was the goal.
Austin. Not Grant. Fuck that guy.
Ivy peeked around the pillar. The years had been unfairly kind to him. They hadn’t been cruel to her by any means, but they’d been generous with him.
Austin’s adulthood transformation wasn’t quite so jarring, but she’d seen him on TV. Thanks to Kaleidoscope Falls, she even knew what he looked like mostly naked.
Her eyes strayed back to Grant. Did he look as good out of his clothes as he did in them?
The warning bell for the baggage carousel blared, and Ivy jolted out of her musings like the universe had just hit her on the nose with a newspaper.
She hid behind the pillar again, which felt suspiciously like the last time she’d hidden from the Underwoods, stuck in the old tree house, desperate to be seen and remain invisible at the same time.
She could just wait until hers was the last bag on the carousel.
Or she could run outside and tell her dad they’d lost her bag.
She could abandon those boots she’d thrifted in Paris, right?
She loved those boots more than she hated Grant.
People crowded the carousel as the luggage began its long, slow ride. Ivy saw her bag glide past, leading the parade. Of course, the one and only time her suitcase came out first, she was too chickenshit to grab it.
It drifted by another time before Ivy checked around the pillar again. The Underwoods had left. She ran to the end of the carousel and grabbed her bag right before it disappeared again.
This kind of evasion wasn’t sustainable.
The Underwoods were their neighbors. Grace and her mom were practically joined at the hip.
She was going to run into Grant at least once while she was in Coeur-de-Lac.
Probably more than once, if he wasn’t avoiding her, too.
How could she take control of the situation?
Should she sprint outside to try to catch them and rip off the Band-Aid, leggings be damned?
Did she schedule a calculated cookie drop-off at his parents’ house on a day when her curls were behaving?
Ivy lingered inside until her dad called.
“Where are you?” Paul asked. “The traffic cop is giving me a dirty look.”
“I’m coming,” she fibbed, peering out the glass doors for any signs of a rogue Underwood. “You know how baggage claim is.”
Ivy dashed outside to her dad’s waiting car and heaved her almost-fifty-pound suitcase into the open trunk, slammed it shut, and scrambled into the passenger seat.
“Let’s go,” she said before she had her seat belt buckled.
Her dad frowned. “What’s the rush? Did you steal that bag?”
“Of course not. I don’t want someone else’s dirty laundry. You said there was a cop glaring at you, so I got here as fast as I could.”
“I wasn’t that worried about it,” he said, still looking at her like he was trying to decide if she’d been abducted by aliens.
“What are you waiting for? Culver’s is calling and I am starving.”
As her dad pulled away from the curb, Ivy refused to look too closely at the twinge of hunger that had been plaguing her for ten years. It had nothing to do with ButterBurgers.
And everything to do with the Underwoods.