Gretchen Engel looked up from her sewing machine, an antique Singer she’d stationed by the window of the loft in her family’s barn. A year earlier, she’d claimed the space as her own makeshift apartment and crafting studio.
Snow fell outside. Oversized, fluffy flakes of the stuff, surreal looking.
Inches of white already blanketed the wooded forest beyond her window, padding the barn from outside noise. That of her family, who lived in the house next to the barn.
Christmas music, tinny and somber, drifted from her CD player—yes, CD player. The one her mother had found at a yard sale the summer before. Gretchen didn’t mind being behind the times when it came to technology, though. She liked the comfort of a commercial-free listening experience, even if “Little Drummer Boy” skipped on the chorus.
She returned her attention to the sewing machine, threading the bobbin with red, silken thread, and replacing the metal plate.
Then, Gretchen reached for the white fabric, cut in the shape of a stocking and pinned inside out in preparation to be sewn up. She adjusted everything just so, lowered the foot, and set about running the would-be Christmas gift through, slowly, then quickly. Smoothly, the gentle whir lulling her into a trance.
After finishing the length of the stocking foot and turning up carefully to head back toward the top of it, Gretchen let out a sigh of relief.
This was the first one that hadn’t tangled the thread and snagged everything up.
Her shoulders relaxed, she pulled the fabric out the back far enough to snip the thread and admire her work.
Simple and clean, if a little bland. She’d doll the piece up, adding applique reindeer to the cuff, once she’d sewn that part by hand and added looping stitches around the whole of it—for a charming effect. For now, though, it was good progress. She was due at the Inn in half an hour, and she still needed to get ready.
Gretchen drew the cloth cover over her machine, piled her fabric neatly to the side of her sewing table, and descended the ladder into the bottom level of her barn house.
In the previous year, she’d managed to make the space cozy and homey, adding rustic touches from trips to various yard sales and estate sales around Hickory Grove and in neighboring areas.
It wasn’t until her boyfriend broke up with her, however, that Gretchen had really settled in. Clinging to the belief that Theo Linden would eventually whisk her away to a shiny new apartment near Notre Dame, where he was on scholarship, proved to be little more than a pipe dream. Plainly put, the two were far too opposite to work. Gretchen was a beauty-school dropout who worked part-time at a diner and part-time at a bed-and-breakfast. She had three much-younger siblings to babysit and a mom with a new husband and an in-home business—hair, of course.
Theo, on the other hand, was the only child of local sweetheart, Miss Becky Linden Durbin, who owned and ran a bookshop in town. Theo was up north, studying law, just like his stepfather before him, in one of the best private universities in America and on a full-ride academic scholarship, to boot.
See? Opposites. Total opposites. And although opposites may attract… that didn’t necessarily mean their strength didn’t eventually putter away.
But the silver lining to the end of that relationship was Gretchen’s newfound joy in making the barn behind her family’s farm a true home. Any extra time she had, she worked on it, sanding bare wood, staining or painting it, and filling the hollow and vast space with the perfect pieces to suggest she was much, much more than a beauty-school dropout with two part-time jobs.
One day, Gretchen promised herself, she really would be more than that. She would, like her mother, own her own business, right there in that barn. And whether she had a smart boyfriend with a fancy college degree or a downhome boy with scuffed work boots and a rusty pick-up truck, well, that just wouldn’t matter.
Because Gretchen would have her own thing going.
A crafting business, ideally.
Just as she tugged her down coat on and slung her handbag over her shoulder, her phone chimed. Gretchen snatched it from the arm of the sofa and made her way outside, where the snow had taken a break, but the sky was heavier yet—dark and wet and frigid.
She glanced at the screen. A text message awaited her. One line. Simple. Timely. And aggravatingly cute.
“I’ll be home for Christmas…”
Gretchen did a doubletake of the sender’s name, surprised and yet unsurprised to confirm that, yes. It was Theo.
Only in your dreams, she thought and shoved the device deep into her pocket.