“There had better be proper gravy!”

Zack smiled at May Pearson as he added an extra roast potato to her plate, hoping that the time she took to chew it would give everyone else a bit more peace.

“There is proper gravy? Not that fancy stuff they give you in a small jug in a posh restaurant that isn’t enough to drown one potato.”

It continued and he wished sometimes that it wouldn’t.

“There’s proper gravy for you May and something a bit richer for those who want that. We thought of everything,” he said, catching sight of Sorrell who was serving at another table. He hoped he’d thought of everything.

Last night he’d said more than he’d intended, but he wanted her to know that she wasn’t simply someone he was passing the time with. He could see more with her, a fact his family had picked up on because they had stepped back on the teasing and comments, realising that he was in deep with her.

“What about the alpacas?” Mac said. “Have they been looked after properly this morning? I’d have gone to help Jake but that daft son of mine came.”

Mac’s family had visited him early on. They’d asked him to go with them and have Christmas dinner at their house, but he’d refused, preferring to stick with routine, which had started to include feeding the alpacas each morning. No one was complaining: Mac was physically fairly fit, just a bit forgetful and incapable of looking after himself after having a wife who did it for him for more than fifty years. He liked being at Sunrise and now he liked having his purpose with the animals again, having been a farmer himself.

“You can sort them tomorrow,” Zack said.

“That’s if we don’t die from food poisoning overnight,” May said, voicing more doom than should be allowed on Christmas Day. “There could be none of us left tomorrow with all this posh food.”

“May, it’s Christmas dinner like you have every year. In fact, you had your Christmas dinner in that same spot for the last six years running,” he said.

“Well it doesn’t look like it!” May said, banging the base of her knife on the table. May was frequently cantankerous, but even more so when her children were due to visit as they were that afternoon.

“Ignore the silly old bat,” Mac said. “You know how she is if anything ever changes.”

Zack did. Because May made sure everyone knew about it.

Half an hour later, the ballroom at the Manor was filled with the care home’s residents, some of their families and staff eating Christmas pudding, or sitting with someone while they ate Christmas pudding. Gran had arrived with the other two members of her coven to sit with Glenda, although the three of them were actually eating Christmas dinner later in one of the gastropubs with Gran’s son and a handful of other people.

There had been presents for all the residents, something Zack had argued with his uncle long and hard about because it totalled to a large amount, that would affectively eat into their profits. But when Zack had, three years ago, threatened to pay for it out of his own wages, his uncle had agreed, so even Willy Chambers, who had no living relatives, had something to open that morning.

His phone vibrated, which was never a good sign. It was either Jake telling him he’d burned the beef—turkey was out this year—or something at the actual care home.

“What’s up? You look pensive,” Sorrell said, coming to stand next to him. She’d helped the kitchen staff this morning and two of the carers who had come in specially to add more Christmas décor to the large hall.

“Joan Bagley has died,” he said quietly. “The doctor is on her way.”

“I’m sorry,” Sorrell said, pushing her arm through his, a small gesture meant to give him comfort. “I know she had been poorly for a while. It’s just a shame it had to be Christmas Day.”

Zack typed a quick response and put his phone back in his pocket. “It isn’t unusual to lose someone on Christmas Day. Her family came to sit with her this morning and it seems she hung on for that and then slipped away. She wasn’t suffering and it would’ve been peaceful.”

He’d sat with her too for twenty minutes before her family had arrived, having a feeling that it would be the last time with how her breathing was. She’d declined in the past few days but it was still sad for the family and those that had cared for her.

“She was a resident for a while, wasn’t she?” Sorrell said.

He recognized her therapist’s voice which made him smile. She couldn’t help herself.

“She moved in pretty much the same time I started. But back then she was up dancing and playing crib,” Zack said, feeling it now. The loss. It didn’t get easier like some people thought, nor was it just a job. But he knew as well as anyone that this was life and it had to carry on—he had to carry on—for the sake of those around him.

“You cared,” Sorrell said. “That counts for a lot. Do you want to head over to Sunrise and check on your staff?”

He had a thought, one that he should’ve had before, damn it. “Ells, when you’ve got yourself a bigger staff team here would you consider working a day a week at Sunrise with the staff and families? I’ve talked about it with the board but never acted on actually employing a counsellor. I don’t think we’ve had one living in Severton before.”

“Possibly,” she said. “I could be interested in that. I have counselled adults before although it’s been just children more recently. But it’s Christmas day. Let’s go and sit with Gran for five and catch up on the Severton gossip.”

He took her arm as she tried to move away. “Sorrell, we are the Severton gossip!”

Sorrell had packed an overnight bag and for the first time since moving to Severton, she was staying somewhere other than the hotel—Zack’s childhood bedroom. He’d promised her that it wasn’t still full of posters of models or cars on his walls and he’d also promised her that the duvet set wasn’t still a Transformers one. And that it was a double bed. Despite those promises, she was still feeling nervous and had the urge to bolt for the hills and take cover.

She was worried about the gifts she’d gotten him, and the ones she’d bought for Jake, Rayah, Scott and Alex. There was a bottle of Scotch for his dad and a bottle of gin for his uncle—easy gifts to choose, but she hadn’t wanted to be empty handed for the rest of the family.

And she’d baked. Excessively. She’d been up at five anyway to turn on the ovens for the chefs from Sunrise and that was when she’d started to bake and ice. The Christmas cake had been done a week ago, the Christmas pudding before that. But the Yule Log needed to be fresh and the cake needed icing.

She’d then started on cookies, snickerdoodles and a trifle and finished with a recipe for a marmalade cake as she’d heard that Zack’s dad was partial to oranges. There was enough to feed half of Severton and certainly too much for one dinner, even if it was for seventeen people. Still, Christmas was all about the leftovers.

The farmhouse was only ten minutes’ drive from the hotel, even in icy conditions that she was just about getting used to driving in. Zack had offered to pick her up, but she knew he was quite possibly going to be called out to Sunrise and she didn’t want to be left without a means of getting back to the hotel should she need to.

A horse was outside the farmhouse, seemingly enjoying a trot in the snow. Scott was with it, arms folded, watching it prance about with a knowing look in his eye.

“Christmas present?” Sorrell said, opening the boot of her car and picking up a large pallet of baked goods.

Scott nodded. “Kind of. He was Niall’s. There’s a mare in the stable too.”

Sorrell remembered the farmer whose heart attack had happened suddenly. “How’s he doing?”

“Well,” Scott said. “He’s going to recover, but he’s selling the farm to Jake. That means he’ll be able to live in the farmhouse there and have a hand in what’s going on. It’s a good expansion. Jake has plans, which is always slightly unnerving. Here, let me get that.” He walked over to the car and took the palette from her. “Happy Christmas by the way, and welcome to the madness that is a Maynard Christmas dinner.”

“Is it really Jake who does the cooking?”

Scott laughed. “Yep. Every single year. Don’t tell him I said so, but he’s actually quite good at it.”

Sorrell lifted another box from the boot and followed Scott into the house. It was a decidedly male environment, the lounge conducive to watching sport on a TV that was the biggest she’d ever seen in someone’s home. The chairs were leather, and were recliners, apart from one huge sofa against the far wall.

She could smell food and automatically heard her stomach rumble, a protest that she hadn’t eaten since early this morning.

“Ells.”

She heard Zack’s voice and smiled. It had only been a couple of hours since he’d left the hotel to check on Sunrise and the staff, and make sure everything was in order after the death of Joan, but she had missed him.

“I may have baked a bit too much,” she said.

“I thought that when I saw you this morning,” he said, taking the box from her. “You had flour all over your face.”

She laughed. “I didn’t realise you were in the kitchen!” She had been lost to her measurements and flavours, needing to find a bit of head space before a day that wasn’t going to be predictable.

“I could’ve eaten you then,” Zack murmured quietly. “But then everything would’ve been late. I’ll work extra hard at eating my seconds after.”

She felt her centre clench at the thought and tried to pull herself together, remembering that this was the first time she was meeting all of his family in one go and she couldn’t spend the afternoon and evening thinking about what Zack was going to do with that mouth later.

“Help me get my things in from the car,” she said, her voice staying low too. “And then you can show me your room.”

“I like it when a woman is forward like that,” he said, kissing her on her temple.

Twenty minutes later she had put the Christmas pudding onto steam for another couple of hours and had a glass of wine by the fire in the lounge, her overnight bag safely deposited in Zack’s old bedroom.

“Who’s coming today?” she said. Alex had just arrived, a pretty lady with him who was looking at him like he was the God of some sublime planet. Jake and Scott were there alone, their fathers and Jake’s mum in the kitchen discussing local gossip.

Jake pressed a button on the chair and made it recline. He had a bottle of beer in hand and looked as if there was no place he’d rather be. “Us. Rayah’s here soon too, she’s just been helping Jonny this morning with the kids. Jonny and the kids are coming. Then there’s Niall’s wife and Colin and Dave, who are two of the farmers nearby. They’re both single and their kids are spending Christmas elsewhere.”

“You’ve cooked for seventeen?” Sorrell said, unable to hide her shock. Playboy Jake did not appear to be a master in the kitchen.

“Yep. And now I can sit back, enjoy the fruits of my amazing labour and be waited on. And for the first time in twelve months, I can have a hangover, because my morning jobs are covered tomorrow,” Jake said, smugly, taking the first taste of his beer.

Sorrell watched the expressions of the others, including the woman Alex had brought. She was called Sophia and worked in Leeds as an accountant. Her presence was a bit of surprise as no one had known he was seeing someone seriously; he’d just given Jake the head’s up that he needed an extra place for someone for dinner.

“And then tomorrow you have your attempt at breaking three world records, because that’s what normal people do on Boxing Day,” Scott said. “Have you been practicing?”

Sorrell looked to Zack, who shook his head.

“It’s only about eating quickly. And having a large mouth,” Jake said. He beamed at Sophia and Sorrell saw Alex’s expression turn black. “You should come watch. It’ll be impressive.”

What was impressive was dinner. Sorrell sat back in a reclining chair and undid the top button of her jeans. They’d even had a break between dinner and pudding to try and create some room, but she still felt as if food wouldn’t be necessary for at least another week.

“We’ll do Christmas presents when everyone can move,” Jake’s mum, Juliet said. She was a feisty woman, clearly the boss of her husband who was no pushover. “And if that man of mine has bought me anything that resembles a household product he can sleep with the alpacas tonight.”

Sorrell smiled, feeling sleepy. Then she felt a hand on her shoulder from above her and saw Zack.

“Come with me for a minute,” he said. “Before the madness of exchanging gifts starts.”

She managed to force herself up and follow Zack into his room, a room that didn’t resemble anything to do with a teenage boy anymore. White walls, crisp blue linen and a wooden floor, it was now a simple guest room.

He sat down on the bed, pulling his bag onto his knee and rummaged around. Eventually he pulled out a present that was clumsily wrapped, the corners not quite neat and there was a gape in the paper.

“Wrapping gifts is not my forte,” he said. “But I hope you like it. You’ve a couple more under the tree, but given you’ll be opening them in front of my family, I thought you’d prefer this privately.”

She smiled, her heart racing. What if she didn’t like it? What if it wasn’t right? She didn’t want to hurt his feelings. A million more questions attacked her mind like mosquitoes.

“Ells, stop overthinking it and open the damn thing. It doesn’t have teeth!”

She started to pull at the paper, figuring it was jewellery. A velvet blue box with an old-fashioned clasp was revealed. She didn’t tell him he shouldn’t have or reproach him because that would’ve criticised his gesture and when she opened the box, she was glad he’d chosen what he had.

Two blue stones were set in white gold, surrounded by tiny diamond chips, making the prettiest stud earrings she’d seen. They were antique, she could tell, and she figured the stones were originally from the mines.

“They’re gorgeous,” she said. “They’re what I would’ve picked for myself. Thank you.” She leaned over to kiss him and then went to put them on. “I’ll give you yours. I figured the same thing about opening in front of your family.”

Sorrell picked up the gift from the side of the bed and passed it to him. The wrapping was a lot tidier than his had been, his smile suggesting that he’d noticed that too as he inspected it.

“There are a couple more things under the tree too—we had the same idea.” Nerves rankled through her. Her gift was a suggestive one, one that had taken some thought and consideration and a long conversation with Gwensi. She still was apprehensive about it, but the thought of being in Severton and not having Zack around wasn’t one she wanted to give time to.

He opened the paper and laughed. “The same wash bag and the toiletries I use. This is either a hint that I need a better personal hygiene routine or that you don’t mind me staying over.”

“Try the latter,” she said. “You still have eleven days to show me why this is more than just an itch being scratched.”

“Have I got time to scratch a different itch now,” he said. “My family will all be sleeping off the food for another hour. That gives us time…”

“How do you propose to scratch a different itch exactly? And where might that itch be?” she said, relief, excitement and something approaching calm folding over her.

“Let me show you,” he said, and then stood up to make sure the door was locked.