Season of Love

by Helena Greer

Genres: Jewish Fiction; Holiday Romance; LGBT & Pride

Synopsis

Buzzfeed’s Most Anticipated LGBTQ Romances of 2022
 
Miriam Blum has no choice but to face the past she thought she’d left behind when she inherits her great-aunt’s Christmas tree farm in this witty, glittering, heart-filled romcom with “all of the warm, queer, Jewish holiday vibes you could possibly want” (Jen DeLuca, USA Today bestselling author of Well Matched)
 
“A warm, cozy holiday romance . . . a vibrant exploration of embracing that which is most unexpected in life . . . and in love. Best read under the glow of rainbow twinkle lights with a cup of cocoa.”
—Ashley Herring Blake, author of Delilah Green Doesn’t Care

Thanks to her thriving art career, Miriam Blum finally has her decoupaged glitter ducks in a row—until devastating news forces her to a very unwanted family reunion. Her beloved great-aunt Cass has passed and left Miriam part-owner of Carrigan’s, her (ironically) Jewish-run Christmas tree farm.
 
But Miriam’s plans to sit shiva, avoid her parents, then put Carrigan’s in her rearview mirror are spoiled when she learns the business is at risk of going under. To have any chance at turning things around, she’ll need to work with the farm’s grumpy manager—as long as the attraction sparking between them doesn’t set all their trees on fire first.
 
Noelle Northwood wants Miriam Blum gone—even if her ingenious ideas and sensitive soul keep showing Noelle there’s more to Cass’s niece than meets the eye. But saving Carrigan’s requires trust, love, and risking it all—for the chance to make their wildest dreams come true.

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 368

Sample

Chapter 1

Miriam

When Miriam Blum’s life changed forever, she was holding a chain saw in both hands, a bottle of glitter glue between her teeth, and standing in an empty warehouse over an antique bed frame.

The warehouse was mostly dust, painted concrete, and fluorescent lights, but soon it would be the flagship storefront for Blum Again Vintage & Curios, her online antique upcycling business. The old naval shipyard of Charleston was the perfect spot for its first ever physical space. As part of the up-and-coming arts destination, it would be a place for people to find, as her window promised, “What You Never Knew You Always Needed.”

She’d just flown back to Charleston this morning from a whirlwind trip to spend Sukkot with some friends, and to check in on her network of Old Ladies who owned antique and junk shops. They kept her supplied with weird vintage things she chainsawed, decoupaged, and hot-glued into art pieces that were shockingly popular on Pinterest. At the moment, she was waiting on a potentially haunted doll for a client in Huntington and some brooches she was going to make into the skirt of a life-sized ballerina.

Her phone played a dirge from the pocket of her dress—her mother’s ringtone. Setting down the chain saw, she walked outside to take the call, not wanting to get her mother’s energy in this space. The dread that always accompanied speaking to her mother coalesced uneasily with the realization that it wasn’t their designated time to check in. Miriam couldn’t handle more than one phone call a month, which her mother knew—even if she never acknowledged it. If the schedule had changed, something bad must have happened.

“Mom, what’s wrong? It’s not our Friday,” she said, instead of hello.

“Well,” her mother said primly, “if you would accept my calls any time other than Shabbos…” She trailed off, her guilt trip hanging heavy in the air. Miriam didn’t feel guilty. Her mom knew why their relationship was relegated to fifteen carefully curated minutes a month.

“Mom. Why. Are. You. Calling?” Miriam asked, again. She kicked an acorn across the street, watching it skitter.

“Cass died, sweetheart. I’m so sorry.” Her mom’s voice broke on the last word.

Miriam gasped, her heart clenching.

Despite not having seen her in ten years, Cassiopeia Carrigan was the North Star in Miriam’s life, her role model and hero. Her mother’s aunt was the gray sheep of her family. She’d walked away from the family’s booming bakery business to open, of all things, a Christmas tree farm. More than that, the property was a Christmas extravaganza, with a tree farm, a Christmas-themed inn, and a two-month-long festival full of every Christmas tradition ever invented. An immersive Christmasland experience.

“I’m still Jewish,” Cass would explain. “I just couldn’t find another job where I only had to talk to people two months out of the year.” Cass was An Eccentric. Every winter break, her parents had taken Miriam to Carrigan’s Christmasland for the world’s least traditional Hanukkah.

“Miri? You still there?” Her mother’s voice cut through her memories. She sounded exhausted and broken, two things Miriam would have said her mother was incapable of feeling.

“How?” Miriam asked, trying to wrap her mind around the idea of anything taking out the human tornado that had been Cass Carrigan as Miriam knew her.

Her mother took in a sharp breath. “She was sick for a long time, Miri. Years. We thought she was getting better, but she had a relapse, and she was gone fast.”

Cass Carrigan, her Cass, had been sick and no one told her, so that she could say goodbye. In the lifelong list of her mother’s betrayals, this one was worse than most.

“When is the service? I want to sit shiva. I’ll be there, even”—she tried not to choke on the words—“if Dad is coming.” Her mother was silent for a beat.

“I’ll text you all the details,” she said, finally.

Just like that, it was settled. Miriam would fly back to the place she’d been avoiding for a decade. She told the voice in her head screaming in panic that it would be fine.

She’d spent every Christmas, and some summers, at Carrigan’s. She’d thrived under Cass’s love—a heat lamp compared to the frigid conditions of her house—running wild through the trees with her cousin Hannah and their childhood best friend, Levi. Being safe, for little pockets of time, from the worst of her father’s behavior. Until her dad finally went too far, and she’d stopped going anywhere near her family—anywhere he’d ever been. There hadn’t been goodbyes or any explanation for the people she’d left behind.

Miriam had kept in touch, sort of, with a happy birthday text here, a letter there, sometimes sending a flower arrangement for the High Holy Days. Nothing that went past the surface. She’d never meant for her absence to be permanent. She’d just needed some time.

“Next year, at Carrigan’s” was her tiny private version of “Next year, in Jerusalem.” She’d always thought, Next year, I’ll have the courage. Next year, I’ll stop running, and go home to my family. But she’d always seemed to have a good reason to put it off, and now it was too late. Now, the only thing left was to say the goodbye she hadn’t said ten years ago.

Miriam locked up the warehouse and began walking home, hoping the long meander through the old city would help sort out her thoughts. Her mind raced as she tried to figure out how to fit a trip to New York into her current life. The storefront’s grand opening wasn’t until New Year’s Eve, but she would have to be back in Charleston as soon as shiva ended to prepare.

On top of the store opening, her fiancée, Tara, hosted or attended a seemingly never-ending stream of social events. Miriam was expected to appear at them all and schmooze. She didn’t know how Tara would react to her having to leave, even for a short time. Probably not well. Tara’s life was impeccably planned, and any variation perturbed her.

The tight schedule was good. No matter how nuclear things went at Carrigan’s, she had reasons to come back to Charleston immediately. An escape plan. At worst, she would have a really bad week dealing with everything she’d left behind, but it would only be a week.

Charleston’s Historic District was a town of ghosts, held at bay by the haint blue painted around doors and under porches. Horse-drawn tourist carriages clogged narrow streets, winding past the market that stretched for blocks, where you could buy artisan goods, Gullah-Geechee baskets, and so much food. Master builders renovated historic homes, churches older than the country flew Pride flags from their wrought iron fences, restaurants did molecular gastronomy takes on shrimp and grits.

It was a city full of people trying to tie their roots to their futures. Miriam, who had severed nearly all her roots and was making her future up as she went, was drawn to that. Charleston was a perfect place to lick her wounds, hide out, build a new version of herself that none of her family knew. The polar opposite of Carrigan’s, which had built her and knew all her secrets. Charleston wasn’t home, exactly, but it was a hell of a lot safer than Carrigan’s.

Yet just around that corner, there was a port with many of the country’s worst sins written on it, and you couldn’t walk a block without bumping into living, thriving injustice. Charleston’s charming gentility was a beautifully painted mask on hundreds of years of pain, its safety a facade.

Speaking of places that were not home, exactly—when she opened the door of the home she shared, marginally, with Tara, the wall of humidity off that same port surrendered to an assault from the air-conditioning.

Tara’s Single House was a showcase. Always full of light, but rarely noise, it was the perfect set piece for the lesbian debutante daughter of one of Charleston’s oldest families to entertain. Tara wore perfect Southern gentility like armor in battle, wielding her manners and the legacy of her family’s power as weapons in her crusade to radically change South Carolina’s criminal justice system. This house was her command center.

There was a place inside for Miriam’s purse, jacket, shoes. There wasn’t a place for her art, but she had the warehouse. Miriam had never had a home that reflected her or made space for her. She caught herself, sometimes, dreaming of vibrant walls and kitschy clutter, but asking for it felt beyond her. She’d been too well trained as a child not to intrude.

Miriam dropped her keys in a hammered silver bowl on a carved teak stool in the foyer, listening to them echo. Her foot connected with something heavy, wheeling it away. She looked down, dazed, to find her carry-on. She’d left it there earlier today, arriving home from the airport before heading straight to the warehouse to get work done. It made the house feel like an Airbnb she was checking out of. At least I won’t have to unpack, she thought a little hysterically.

At the end of the polished wood hallway, a blonde bob peeked out of a doorway.

“Babe! I’ll be off this conference call in five minutes. I have dinner being delivered any moment.” Tara didn’t yell, just projected her honey drawl down the hallway, by force of will. Her hair swung, shiny, back into her office.

Miriam pulled her own dark curls into a messy bun. Unlike Tara’s willowy frame, Miriam was very short, just over five feet, although the halo of her curls gave her the appearance of another three inches or so. She usually wore it long and big and untamed. With her small, pointy face and very large features, she resembled nothing so much as an illustration of a Lost Boy. She felt lost, now, as she sank down into a chaise longue, set adrift by the idea of returning to Carrigan’s. By the loss of Cass’s existence, somewhere, in the world.

She was ordering a Lyft to the airport when Tara sat down next to her, bumping her with a shoulder. “Hey, you.”

“Hey, you, back.” Miriam tried to move her mouth into a semblance of a smile.

“There should be barbecue on our doorstep any second,” Tara began, looking at her phone and not noticing Miriam’s mood. “I made sure there’s no hidden pork in yours. I’m almost done with trial prep for the day.”

“Tara,” Miriam interrupted, “I have to go to New York. Today. My great-aunt Cass died.”

Tara slowed, softened. “Oh, Miriam. Oh my gosh.” Miriam found herself being pulled into a hug. “Do I know who your great-aunt Cass was?” Tara asked, puzzled.

Miriam almost choked on a sob of surprise. She’d never told Tara about Carrigan’s. Of course she hadn’t.

Carrigan’s was the thing that had most hurt to give up when she’d cut ties with her family. The place closest to her heart. She never talked about it now, if she could help it, and Tara had met her in the time After. And if Miriam never talked about Carrigan’s, she never talked about Cass, because Cass was Carrigan’s.

Besides, she and Tara didn’t have a relationship built on sharing their deepest secrets. Tara had needed an interesting wife as an accessory to throw garden parties, and Miriam had needed a place to land with someone safe. Tara was often thought of, by Charleston’s old guard, as a bit of an icy bitch, partly because she challenged them and partly because she was prickly as hell. Miriam helped her project a softer public image, and Tara took care of Miriam’s needs even as her prickliness kept Miriam comfortably at a distance, where she preferred to be.

They were friends, lovers, and co-conspirators, but they were not in love. They had a pact: Miriam helped Tara create a faultless life, and Tara gave Miriam stability to build her career.

Neither their souls nor their pasts were a part of their arrangement. Miriam would never have agreed to marry Tara if she’d thought there was any danger of falling in love with her.

“I’ve mentioned Cass,” she insisted nonetheless, crossing her arms. “She owns a Christmas tree farm in the Adirondacks. My cousin Hannah works there? My family spent our vacations there when I was a child, and Cass was very important to me. Carrigan’s was very important to me, once.”

“I’m sure if you had mentioned that to me,” Tara bristled, “I would have remembered.”

“Maybe?” But Miriam knew she was unfairly picking a fight. Tara never forgot anything.

Tara hummed. “Well, we were supposed to be at a party for my firm, but we can make it up. The firm will understand that you were pulled out of town for a family funeral. Although for a great-aunt you haven’t seen in ten years, perhaps you could send a floral arrangement?” Tara was slowing her Southern cadence down even further, in that way she did when she wanted to give the listener time to change their answer.

Tara was very effective in front of a jury.

“I need to go be with my family. I need to go home to Carrigan’s,” Miriam told her.

Tara stared back. “Miriam. One: Carrigan’s is not home, it is a place you spent vacations. I’ve never even heard of it until today. Two: You are estranged from your family. Three: You’re Jewish, and Carrigan’s is, apparently, a Christmas tree farm.”

Tara always argued in numbered lists, without giving anyone breathing room, so that by the time she got to point five, you’d forgotten what point one was. It was a great lawyer trick, but a less charming girlfriend trick.

Miriam took a deep breath, though a tsunami of grief threatened to swallow her. She stuffed it down, as she’d done with all her feelings for so long now, and tried to be fair to Tara.

Tara wasn’t fixating on law firm dinners for nothing. She’d built her criminal defense practice to ensure fair trials for those victimized by the very systems her family had upheld for generations. But to reform those power structures from within, she needed to maintain access to them. To keep herself from being ostracized, especially as a lesbian, she was always skating a fine line. She skated it beautifully, gracefully, from years of practice—but with enormous effort.

Miriam couldn’t be mad at Tara for panicking a little, even if her grief wanted someone to lash out at.

She jumped off the couch and wiped away tears.

“I’ll be back right after shiva. I promise. I’ll do all the rounds with you, be the perfect fiancée,” Miriam said, grabbing her scarf and coat, then the forgotten carry-on. “I need one week, then we can go back to pretending my old life never existed. Believe me, I’ll be ready for that after seven days with my mother.”

“Let me meet you in a couple of days,” Tara said, her voice softer. “I need to rearrange a few things, because I’m supposed to be at trial, but I can make it work. Then we can come home together.”

Miriam couldn’t stomach the idea of managing Tara’s almost certain dislike of the eccentric, cluttered chaos of Carrigan’s, introducing her parents, being present for Tara while also trying to get through the week herself. It was kind of Tara to offer, but Miriam didn’t want Tara to be a part of this. She wanted her Before and After lives to stay very, very separate.

“We both know you can’t, Tara.” Miriam shook her head. “There’s no way they can spare you from your trial, and you can’t have your phone at shiva! Your client is relying on you, and my family is going to be as much as I can handle.”

Tara never let down a client, which Miriam admired immensely. It also allowed Miriam an easy out.

Tara bit her lip. “I’m sorry I would be something else to handle.”

Maybe not such an easy out, then. “Thank you for offering. I have to go to the airport, like, right now. I will be back in a week. I just. I have to deal with this.”

Tara followed Miriam out the door, as etiquette demanded. No emotion ever got between Tara Sloane Chadwick and proper etiquette.

Miriam was already regretting leaving things this way, but she couldn’t figure out how to fix this chasm right now. She had far wider chasms to worry about.

“I’ll call you a car,” Tara offered, a little stiffly. She always got formal when she was upset.

“My Lyft’s already here. I’m sorry I’m missing the takeout you ordered. I owe you a dinner next week.”

One week at Carrigan’s to say goodbye. It would be over before she knew it.

Chapter 2

Miriam

The car had barely turned off her block when her phone rang, again, this time with a Britney Spears song.

If she didn’t answer, Cole would just keep calling. Cole had been her best friend since college, and while she loved him more than life, he was a lot. She wasn’t particularly ready to deal with him, but then again, she wasn’t ready to deal with anything. She might as well start somewhere. “Cole.”

“MIMI, WHERE ARE YOU?!” he demanded. “You never answered my texts I need you immediately.”

“Cole, breathe real deep.” Miriam rubbed her hand over her face. “I’m on my way to the airport. I need to book the next flight to New York.” She stretched out her booted legs, belatedly wishing she’d stopped to change her socks. Her entire world had just crashed, but she would rather focus on her eighteen-hour grungy socks.

“You just got home,” he whined. “What, is there an antiquing emergency? Do the Old Ladies need you?”

“I’m not going for work,” she said, dragging in a breath. “I’m going to Carrigan’s.”

“Carrigan’s?” His voice lit all the way up, nearly screeching. Cole had a long fascination with the idea of Carrigan’s, which was most of the reason she’d never taken him there. When they’d met in college, she had still spent every winter break on the farm with Cass, Hannah, Levi, and the rest of the Matthewses, but she’d always found an excuse to leave him behind. By the time she stopped going for good, they’d been living in different states.

“Wait, you don’t go to Carrigan’s. Ever. What happened?”

She braced a hand against the side of the car, grasping for purchase against the wave of grief as she said, “Cass died.” She heard him suck in his breath. “I have to sit shiva.”

“I’ll meet you at the ticket counter.”

“What? You can’t just hie off to upstate New York.” She couldn’t ask him to come keep her company in a place he’d never been, to mourn a woman he’d never met. Although she ought to have expected him to offer. It was like him to drop everything for her.

Her sweet, loyal boy, her platonic puzzle piece.

“I’ll meet you at the airport, Mimi. I’m buying your ticket! I’ve been trying to get you to take me to Carrigan’s for years.” Cole hung up before Miriam could tell him no.

By the time she saw Cole in the ticket line, she had stopped shaking. Mostly.

Cole was huge—very nearly six and a half feet—and built like a rower, with shaggy sand-colored waves of hair and guileless ocean-blue eyes. He’d played lacrosse in college and sailed a yacht. He was a quintessential Southern Bro, hiding a progressive heart behind clothes embroidered with lobsters. When he showed up at the airport in a too-small ugly Halloween sweater over a pink button-down with a popped collar, she felt herself start to breathe a little bit. Cole coming was good. He would distract her from falling apart, and he would pick her up if she did.

“I know you’re going to have an opinion about the sweater.” He held her hands tightly, curling his large body protectively around her very small one like a big brother—or a daddy penguin. “But I’m here with my credit card to whisk you away to your ancestral homeland, so don’t give me shit.”

“I never lived at Carrigan’s, Cole. I’m from Scottsdale. In Arizona?”

“Shh.” He shook his head. “Don’t ruin the magic. I’m ready to immerse myself completely in the Spirit of Christmas. I’m going to be Father Christmas! No, Brother Christmas. I’m too young to be a father.”

He pulled away, bouncing on the balls of his feet. His suitcase, a vintage piece Miriam had bedazzled, threatened to roll away from him. Miriam knew that part of him was exhilarated about finally going to Carrigan’s, but part of it was an act for her. He was giving her an opportunity to fall into their comfortable, playful banter so she could get through the terrible mundanity of the airport intact.

“Also, Mimi. I’m so, so sorry. I know Cass meant the world to you.” He dropped his backpack and wrapped her in a painfully tight hug. “I’m so glad I invited myself. You need me. You can’t face your parents alone.”

Miriam decided to sidestep this mention of her parents. She was going to let Cole’s performance sweep her away for a few hours, before she had to face a Carrigan’s without Cass. Instead, she focused on the rest of what Cole had said.

“You’re thirty-five, Cole. People our age have kids who are in high school. You’re past old enough to be Father Christmas. And I think you are overestimating the Carrigan’s experience.”

“It’s basically the set of a Hallmark movie, right?” His eyes were those of a kid waking up the morning of a Disney World vacation.

She tried to temper his excitement and her own anxiety at the same time.

“I mean, that’s not wildly inaccurate. But remember, I haven’t been back in ten years. And the Christmas festival doesn’t start until November first, which isn’t for a couple of weeks. It might not even be Christmas-y, yet. I don’t know what it’s like now, especially with Cass gone.”

“My body is ready. My faith is going to be renewed. I’m going to find true love.” Cole gestured wildly. “I’m prepared. I packed my candy cane boxers. I can’t wait to meet the real Santa, thinly disguised as a large white-bearded man named Kris.”

She laughed a little, but it threatened to turn into a sob. He put his arm around her shoulder, shuffling them both up to the ticket counter.

“You’re Miriam and Cole,” the woman at the computer said, her eyes wide. “Oh my gosh. Can I take a selfie with you? I always hope I’ll run into you around town, this is so exciting. Are you going on a buying trip for the new store?”

Miriam winced. Not a Bloomer, not right now. The fandom for her online store, and its associated Instagram and Pinterest, was big enough that her followers had given themselves a name. She was used to getting recognized by Bloomers in public, but she couldn’t put on her Bloomer Face today.

Her carefully cultivated persona was for her own privacy. She was incredibly grateful to her fans for making her artwork a viable career, but they wanted to know her, and she barely wanted to know herself. Having that Bloomer Face to slip into had helped her avoid spending too much time in her own brain over the years, but today, when her past was at her doorstep, it was an ill-fitting costume.

She was grateful when Cole took over the conversation, snapping a selfie with the woman while he handed her both their IDs. He steered Miriam meekly to the winding line for TSA. She could barely feel her feet touching the floor. He continued their conversation as if she was responding. It was how he’d been talking to her, basically without stopping, for seventeen years.

“Isn’t Tara freaking out that you’re not helping her prepare for some terrible rich-people party her parents are throwing?” he asked as they put their shoes back on past security.

“Your parents are friends with her parents,” she pointed out. “You’re richer than she is. You took Tara to cotillion.”

“Yes, so I’m uniquely qualified to pass judgment on their parties. They’re terrible.” He swung his arm around her as they walked, and she let her body relax against his.

“She’s freaking out, a little. She doesn’t think I really need to go. But someone needs to help my cousin Hannah mediate all the cousins. Plus, my parents,” she added, grimacing. “And I need to do it, for Cass. It’s important.”

“Well, I do love sitting shiva,” Cole said. “I could eat a hundred hard-boiled eggs. I’m basically Gaston. And, if need be, I can always kill your dad for you.” He shrugged, as if he were joking, though Miriam knew he probably wasn’t. Underneath the yacht bro exterior was a hacker with a feral sense of loyalty to the people he considered his, one that could sometimes supersede his morals. The only reason he hadn’t already wreaked havoc with her dad’s identity was that Miriam had asked him not to.

On the plane, Miriam toyed with the corner of her drink napkin. When Cass was younger and still traveled the world, she would jot down little letters, sketches, and observations. Cass wrote in sharp, uppercase letters of various sizes, with unexpected capitalizations and a great number of exclamation points. She would tuck the napkins into cheesy cards and send them to Miriam from Kathmandu and St. Petersburg and Cairo. Miriam had a box full of them under her bed.

After Miriam stopped coming to Carrigan’s, Cass’s napkins kept arriving. When Miriam least expected it, an envelope would arrive filled with cutting observations and cynical but loving gossip. She checked her purse for a pen, thinking she would do a drawing to keep up the tradition.

Instead, Cole’s conversation sucked her in.

Cole was not an introvert. He’d been known to opine that introverts do not exist. He had trouble understanding that other human beings did not, necessarily, want the gift of his running commentary on the world around him. Miriam found him oddly calming to tune out to.

He was giving their poor, polite seatmate a monologue, describing Carrigan’s with the zeal of a promotional brochure, only not quite accurately, having never been there.

“Mimi’s aunt bought the farm with money she inherited from her father, wh. . .