Lakeshore Christmas by Susan Wiggs

a man regarded awoman just before he kissed her. Which either meant she was a wildly poor reader of facial expressions, or he had unexpected taste in women.
    “You okay?” he asked.
    She hoped the amber parking lot lights concealed her blush. “I’m weird about snow,” she said. “So sue me.”
    “I don’t think you’re weird,” he said. “Just…you look different without your glasses.”
    “Everyone looks different without glasses,” she said, and put hers back on. “I’ll see you at auditions.”
    “I can hardly wait,” he said.
    He was speaking ironically, of course. She’d read him wrong a moment ago; she wouldn’t make that mistake again.
    “Same here,” she said brightly.
    “Be careful going home,” he said.
    “Of course.” She got into her car and turned it on, letting the engine warm up and the defroster blow the windshield while the wipers did their work, clearing the window for a glimpse of the swirling sky. The beauty of the snow coming down never failed to take her breath away. She loved the first snow. She loved Christmas with all her heart, and she always had. It was a time of year that brought her together with friends and family, a time that filled her with hope, with the sense that anything was possible. She refused to let Eddie Haven ruin it.
    He didn’t seem to know what her role was on the night he’d told her about, the night of his accident. Apparently he didn’t even realize she’d been present. It was remarkable how different her memory of that night was from Eddie’s.
    Maureen had attended Heart of the Mountains Church all her life, and that year, it had been more important to her than ever. Her long-awaited, dreamed-of collegesemester abroad had come to a premature and devastating end. If her family hadn’t been there for her, she had no idea whether or not she would have survived. Yet that year, and in all the years since, no one had ever asked her what Eddie had tonight: Have you ever been that hurt by another person, so hurt you didn’t care if you lived or died?
    Singing in the choir at the church that night, Maureen had lifted her voice up to the rafters and beyond. She’d known it then—there was nothing so powerful as the healing she’d found in coming home to her family. She’d always believed Christmas to be a season of miracles. The year they’d lost her mother, the miracle had happened for her father. He’d started to smile again, to live again. At a Christmas Eve potluck, he’d met Hannah, the woman he would eventually marry, the woman who would make their family whole again.
    That year, it was Maureen’s turn.
    She had dragged herself up from the depths of despair, and though she would never be free of the memories of her time overseas—the adventure, the romance, the heartache—she knew she would survive. That was something. When you learned you could survive the unbearable, you could take on the world.
    Fortunately, taking on the world wasn’t required of Maureen. All she had to do was rethink her dreams and remake her own life.
    In this, she’d had help. She wasn’t much of a believer in cosmic signs, but the world in general did seem to be sending her certain signals. Her heart broken and bleeding, she’d spent the remainder of her money on a last-minute ticket home. She’d reached the airport with only a few euro in her money belt. There, a kiosk crammed with books caught her eye. Yes. Her physical escape wasone thing. But her mind had needed a refuge, too. And that refuge was the most reliable place of all—between the pages of a book.
    She saw nothing ironic in the notion that a mystery novel rescued her from having a psychotic break. Some people needed a prescription from a doctor. Maureen needed a trip to the bookstore. At the airport, she’d bought a mystery novel by a popular author, opened it and immediately sank into the story. While she was reading, everything else fell away and she became part of a dark and dangerous world,