Andrew hadn’t listened to the message on his phone yet. It could be from one of three people, one of whom was Becca.

She’d called.

Why had she called?

He sat in his own hotel room, the room service cart over in the corner, the food subpar at this tiny spot in Douglas. If Becca had been with him, he’d be in her room, probably a couple of pizza boxes on the table in front of them.

He hadn’t told her about the first SonarBot expedition. He hadn’t told anyone, because he was barely functioning these days.

It had been quite a fail anyway. Sure, the robot had sent it’s sonar pulses into the rocks, but it hadn’t detected any gas. So it was all quite anti-climatic. Sort of like sitting there in his room, wondering if the message would be from Carla, his mom, or Becca.

They’d all called that afternoon.

He hit the button to listen to his voicemail and learned he had three messages. His mother wanted to let him know that she’d ended things with Admiral, and oh, Beau was hosting Thanksgiving dinner at his bachelor pad because of his new case.

Andrew wasn’t sure what a case had to do with where Beau ate, but Andrew wasn’t going to argue. Celia would make all the food anyway, except maybe the pies his mother would be responsible for. The location of where Carla said, “Becca called, sir. I think you should call her when you get back.”

He wanted to call her right now. If he did, would she tell him to get lost? Report him to the police for continuing contact with her when she’d asked him to stop?

Her voice came on the message next, and his heart leapt around inside his chest like a frog. She sounded stern during the message, all until she said, “Please call me back at your earliest convenience.”

Andrew almost sobbed as he started laughing. Sure, she was still mad at him, because he had promised Mayor Berry he’d have a front-row seat to the SonarBot’s first excursion. And Becca? Becca should be at his side. At work. At home. Always.

He’d wanted to invite her to do everything with him since the tour ended three weeks ago. But she’d made it very clear she wasn’t interested. Could she still be interested? He listened to her message again, definitely detecting a note of playfulness in her last sentence.

Graham’s admonition from last week still rang in Andrew’s ears, but he didn’t know how to show up at Becca’s unannounced and talk to her.

But she had asked him to call her. Could he simply do that? Would it really be that easy?

He touched the phone icon and pulled up her name. Another tap and the phone started opening a connection. Maybe it would be this easy.

Her line rang and rang, and she didn’t answer. “Hey,” he said to her messages. “It’s my earliest convenience, and I’m returning your call. I’ll be honest and say I completely forgot about letting Mayor Berry know about the SonarBot.”

He paused. He forgot, because she had been handling all those details.

“And I miss you. I’ll be back in town in a couple of days. Maybe we can get together then?”

He had so much more to say, but he didn’t want to fill her voicemail with desperate pleas for her to give him another chance. So he finished with, “All right. Talk to you later,” and hung up, hoping later came sooner than three weeks without talking to her.

Twenty minutes later, he was still staring at the TV, no idea which channel he’d even put it on. His phone rang, and he glanced down, his eyesight a bit blurry.

But he still saw Becca’s name and hurried to answer the call. “Hey,” he said, trying not to breathe her name out like he was in love with her.

All at once, he realized he was in love with her.

His heart started pounding and he pulled in a tight breath. “Hello?”

“Hey,” she said. “Sorry, I was outside bringing in all the cat bowls. Or dog bowls. Raccoon bowls.” She blew out her breath as if she’d been running a marathon. “It’s snowing pretty hard. I left my phone inside. You called?”

“You called me. I was just returning at my earliest convenience.”

A beat of silence passed, and then she said, “Mayor Berry was pretty angry. Have you talked to him?”

“No.” Andrew sighed. “I’ll call him.”

“His advisor should’ve called and left a message.”

“Well, he didn’t.” Was she accusing him of something? He had three messages after the SonarBot had failed to find any natural gas. None of them had been from the mayor’s advisor. “Aren’t you the mayor’s advisor?”

“In a way,” she said evasively, which meant, in Becca-speak, no. Andrew wondered what she was doing there, but he was smart enough not to ask.

“I told him I’d find out why you didn’t bother to call him to witness the first SonarBot expedition.”

Andrew pinched the bridge of his nose, foolishness filling him from top to bottom. She hadn’t called because she missed him and wanted to hear his voice. She’d called because it was her job to call. The joke had just been…what? A joke, perhaps.

“I didn’t read your notes,” he said, going for the truth. “I dropped the ball. I forgot.”

“When’s the next one?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Did you watch the whole thing?”

She coughed, a fake sound he’d heard many times when she was about to admit something she wasn’t proud of. He imagined her lifting her chin too. “No.”

“Well, it was a fail,” he said. “So tell him not to get all bent out of shape. Graham’s going to do some tweaks and run some tests, and we’ll do another live excursion. I won’t forget to invite him.”

Or you, he wanted to add but kept way down deep in his gut.

“Thank you,” she said.

He hated this diplomatic game they were playing. He knew the rules, knew the outcome, and he hated it.

“Well, thanks for calling.”

“Did you listen to my message?” he asked.

“No, I just saw you called.”

So she hadn’t heard him admit that he missed her. Hadn’t listened to him ask her out again when he got back to town. Maybe he could convince her to delete it without listening, just to save some pride.

“It just said I forgot. You can delete it.”

“Okay.”

“Okay,” he echoed. But neither one of them hung up. On her end of the line, a dog barked and she exclaimed, “Oh!” and said, “I have to go, Andrew. I’ll call you later.”

A second later, the line was dead. Closed. She was gone.

Andrew let his hand holding his phone fall to his lap. How was he going to survive the holidays without her?

Thanksgiving morning found him in the kitchen with Celia, adding chopped celery, onions, and carrots to a pan sizzling with butter.

“Stir those around.” She handed him a wooden spoon.

“I’m going to burn them,” he said.

“Just stir them.” She returned to the huge loaf of bread she’d made a few days ago and refused to let him have even one slice. She used a large knife to cut the loaf into cubes for the stuffing, and then she stepped back over to him with a small, glass bowl in her hand. “Add this.”

He dumped in the spices and went back to stirring. She’d confronted him last night and practically demanded he get up and help her this morning. She’d said, “You can’t hide out in that bedroom forever.”

“I’m not hiding,” he’d said. “There isn’t anyone to hide from here.”

She’d made a grumpy noise and said, “Seven o’clock. We’re starting the stuffing. Then we’ll make a chocolate pie, the yams, and prepare the creamed corn. We have to leave at eleven to get to Beau’s and get everything hot again.”

He’d watched her march away, down the hall and up the stairs to the room she slept in when she stayed at the lodge.

The scent of sage and garlic wafted up from the pan, and Andrew kept the wooden spoon moving so he didn’t char anything.

Celia took over once the vegetables were soft and a bit see-through. She mixed in some chicken stock and added the panfull of ingredients to the big bowl of bread cubes. The stuffing got smashed in a pan and put in the oven, and she turned to him.

“Want to separate eggs or peel yams?”

“Peel yams.” He felt sure his clumsy fingers would break the yolk of an egg if he tried to separate it from its white. She set him in front of the sink, which was filled with the knobbly, brown-skinned yams. He started peeling, his bicep muscle complaining after one yam had been skinned.

But he kept on, because Celia wasn’t pestering him with questions and he wanted to contribute to the family meal somehow. By eleven, he’d showered and shaved and pulled his sedan right up into the circle drive at the lodge. It was covered, and Mother Nature had decided that snow on Thanksgiving would be beneficial.

With the backseat full of food, he got behind the wheel and waited for Bree to come out with another bag of ice. Celia was following them in her car, and foot by foot, mile by mile, they made it down the canyon and into town.

Beau’s house had a long driveway that he’d obviously been out to shovel already that day. Andrew pulled up as far as he could, because at least three other cars would need to fit. Celia parked beside him, and the three of them got all the food inside.

It was warm in Beau’s house, and Andrew gave his younger brother a big hug. “Thanks for hosting,” he said. “This place looks great.”

“That’s because of Deirdre.” Beau nodded to someone behind Andrew, and Andrew turned to see a gloriously radiant woman standing there. She was nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs, if the way her lip trembled and how she wound her hands around themselves indicated anything.

“My brother, Andrew,” Beau said, approaching her with caution. Andrew had no idea what was going on. His mom had said something about a case, but this didn’t seem like that. This was…babysitting.

“Andrew, this is Deirdre. She’s a client of mine that needed somewhere to be for a little while.” Beau, ever the lawyer, spoke in riddles and vague undertones Andrew used to want to figure out. Today, though, he simply shook Deirdre’s hand and introduced Celia and Bree.

“Put us to work, Celia,” he said, and she did. Beau and Deirdre set the table, and Andrew noticed them with their heads bent together, talking, more than once.

He put the yams and stuffing in the oven to warm again, and Bree started slicing the celery and cucumbers they’d brought from the lodge. Celia made gravy from the drippings of the turkey that Beau had roasted that morning, and then she put together a ranch dip to go with the veggie tray Bree had finished.

With only minutes until lunchtime, Graham and his family arrived, followed by their mother and Eli, Meg, and Stockton.

The atmosphere was vibrant and celebratory. Andrew gripped Eli’s shoulders tight and said, “How’s California?” He hadn’t thought he’d miss his younger brother quite so much, but he had.

“California’s great. I thought you were going to come.” Eli stepped back and looked at Andrew, dozens of questions and implications in his eyes.

“I was. I am. Maybe in January when we’ve got ten feet of snow on the ground.”

Meg laughed, and Andrew gave her a hug too. “You guys should come see the horses while you’re here.” They’d just gotten in last night, Andrew knew that. They’d driven to their mother’s where they were staying.

“Yeah!” Stockton cheered. “Do you still have the snowshoes at the lodge, Uncle Andrew?”

“We sure do, bud.” He glanced out the window. “And there will probably be enough snow by tomorrow to go.”

“Can we, Dad?” Stockton turned to Eli, who smiled down at his son.

“We’ll see, Stocky. We have plans with Grandma for something.”

“Movie,” Meg said softly. “Double date.” She put her finger to her lips like the date was a secret and glanced over her shoulder to where Andrew’s mother worked in the kitchen with Celia.

“Who’s she going out with this time?” Andrew asked.

“You’re still upset about it?” Eli asked.

“I’m not upset.” He just didn’t understand. “Who is it?”

“Dave Dirkle.”

Andrew rolled his eyes and moved away to ask Bailey if she wanted to come snowshoeing tomorrow too.

“Sure,” Laney said. “Stockton will be with us all afternoon, and he loves snowshoeing.”

At least Andrew wasn’t the only Whittaker who didn’t always know what was going on. He wondered if he got married, if Becca would keep track of things like who his mother was dating and when they were babysitting a niece or nephew.

Like lightning had struck him, he realized he’d just pictured himself married to Becca. His heart wailed, but Celia said, “Time to eat,” and everyone gathered over by the bar to say grace.

Andrew felt incomplete during the meal, even when he expressed his gratitude for his family, the food, and the great year they’d had at Springside. Everyone else at the table had someone, and he didn’t.

Even if Beau’s guest was a client, and his mother’s was an old friend they now employed. He still felt all alone amidst the people he loved most, and that was because there was someone who he loved who wasn’t there.

After dinner, while his mom started a pot of coffee and the pies were set on the counter to come to room temperature, he sat down beside Graham and said, “I need to get Becca back. Tell me what to do.”

Eli immediately put his phone down and leaned forward. “Becca?”

“I need to get her back.” Andrew flicked a glance in Eli’s direction. “You guys managed to get women to marry you. Help me.” He obviously wasn’t above begging, and Graham gave him a big smile.

“Okay, here’s what you do….”