Even if it'd been open for an hour, Shelly wouldn't have been able to linger at the open house as long as she wanted to: it was only a few days until Christmas, and as always she had a million things that she needed to do, things she needed to buy, things that had to be planned and worked out and negotiated with her housemates and with her family. Once again she and Hannah were going to spend Christmas with Shelly's family, and Hannah was even starting to get into the idea of Christmas now, and - Shelly hoped - into the idea of family, too. Hannah had even asked her:

"Hon, what do you want for Christmas?"

To which Shelly had replied:

"A new house."

"Okay" Hannah had joked. "I'll write to Santa and I guess we'll find out how good you've been." And Shelly was surprised to realise that Hannah was talking the Christmas lingo like she'd been born to it; and then she was surprised that she was surprised at that at all.

Hannah persisted: "Any idea what you want for Christmas?"

And Shelly thought that really Hannah ought to have a pretty good idea by now of what she liked and what she didn't like, so she said:

"Peace. A lack of stress."

And Hannah said:

"Okay."

And to her credit, Hannah gave her exactly that: she stopped asking Shelly, and she even made an excuse to sneak out of the house one time and the thought, just the thought, that she might be out doing Christmas shopping for her made Shelly tingle with glee, made her feel a way she hadn't felt about Christmas since she'd been about twelve or fourteen years old.

But then there were houses to look at, because really that was what Shelly wanted most of all, and maybe Hannah didn't want it as much because she was so hard right now to coax out to the open houses, and that was neither peaceful nor free of stress.