Did he ever hear “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and in his memory smell the fruity coconut-oil scent of suntan lotion? Would he then recall the way he rubbed it on her shoulders and then the small of her back, his fingertips sliding under her bikini bottoms to tease the round globes of her butt and then trace the half-hidden bumps of her tailbone?

He’d been such a bad boy.

Her bad boy.

But the bad boy had grown into a one-eyed stranger who was already back with a hammer and who didn’t appear interested in talk.

Or interested in her.

So she clapped her mouth shut too and watched him break open the big crate.

Then felt her jaw drop as out of frothy curls of shredded paper he drew a shrink-wrapped gingerbread cookie. A life-sized, frosted-in-colorful-detail sheep. Followed by a calf, a chicken, two lambs. Then it was figures. A man, a woman, an angel, a baby in a cradle. Baby Jesus.

A whole, to-human-scale Nativity scene of gingerbread.

Bailey had to blink a few times to believe her eyes. “Someone has a Neiman Marcus catalog and a triple-platinum AmEx card,” she said.

He said nothing. In silence he stacked the cookies on the lawn, shoved the packing material into a garbage bag, then finally broke down the wood carton, piling the pieces far enough away to create getaway space for her.

Getaway. Great. Perfect. All that she would have asked Santa for if she’d ever had the chance to believe in him.

But the craziness of the family business during December had prompted her parents to forgo the usual fantasy for their child. With Santa visits part of The Perfect Christmas’s holiday schedule, instead it had made sense for them to explain that the man in the red suit who spent afternoons in their store was an out-of-work navy vet and that the character who supposedly left gifts on Christmas mornings for good little girls and boys was none other than their mommies and daddies.