The Present: The must-read Christmas romance of the year!. Charlotte Phillips

the possibility out of hand.

      ‘I know it’s a big ask,’ Lucy said.

      ‘How come you need my help?’ Amy said. ‘You’re Miss Domesticity these days, with your new-build terrace and your nights in, and your two holidays a year.’

      Fair point, Lucy had to admit. She and Rod had settled into a comfortable routine in the last year or so. She had her days out and about with work, and she was more than happy returning home to a cuppa on the sofa and a box set. With Rod, there were never any nasty surprises. Nights out, dinner parties and the like were planned well in advance. Flying towards Christmas by the seat of her social pants was not something she’d anticipated or that she was relishing. But then she hadn’t anticipated Gran’s accident, had she? Or the associated time-suck of having the sorting of the house added to her four-week Christmas break from work. She deliberately ignored the fact that she would have been much further ahead of the game had she taken Rod’s recommended approach of lob everything that wasn’t nailed down into a skip unless it might be worth selling on eBay.

      ‘I got a bit side-tracked with the house clearing,’ she said. She pulled the box of decorations out of her bag and put it on the table between them. Just looking at them again fired up her curiosity. ‘I fell through the attic floor trying to grab these. Jack had to pull me out.’ She unwrapped one to show Amy, and held up a glass ball with three hens painted on it, pecking in a farmyard. ‘Three French Hens,’ she said. ‘They all relate to that partridge-in-a-pear-tree Christmas song. Turns out they’re really old. Someone sent them to Gran during the war. Aren’t they gorgeous?’

      ‘Very pretty.’ Amy flapped a dismissive hand at the box. ‘Never mind them. Who the hell’s Jack?’ She sat forward and planted both elbows on the table, in full-on gossip posture.

      ‘Gran’s maintenance guy; he does the garden, and he’s there touching the house up so we can put it on the market.’ She pointed at Amy with her coffee spoon. ‘You’d like him. He doesn’t do proper relationships either.’ Amy was too absorbed in her business to maintain any relationship that had something as tiresome as strings attached. ‘He’s into extreme sports, and travels the world jumping off cliffs and stuff. Plus, he looks like Tom Hardy,’ she added, drinking the last of her coffee. ‘Always a bonus.’

      ‘Blimey, he sounds absolutely perfect,’ Amy said.

      Did he? Lucy frowned as she picked her bag up from the floor. Was she the only person in the universe who could see the appeal of sleeping with someone who stayed the night instead of necking off before breakfast?

      ‘Pull off the drinks party for me, and I’ll introduce you,’ she said. Her massive Christmas to-do list fluttered out of her bag as she put the decorations back into it and fell to the floor beneath the table.

      ‘What on earth is that?’

      Amy snatched the paper up before Lucy could get to it.

      ‘Order gardening vouchers for Rod’s grandparents,’ she read aloud. ‘Buy dress for Christmas ball. Rod’s DJ dry-cleaning. Clear attic and cupboards at Gran’s. Christmas decorations up. Place cards/seating plan for lunch. Get spare rooms ready for Rod’s family. Cook ahead for Christmas week, portion up and freeze. Christmas potpourri. Are you allowing yourself any time to sleep in the run-up to Christmas?’

      ‘Yeah, well,’ Lucy said, whipping the list out of Amy’s hands with a flourish. ‘Now you know why corner cutting is my new thing when it comes to Christmas cooking. I’ve got a lot on, what with Rod’s perfect family descending on us for Christmas lunch, Gran being ill, and everything else. Rod’s in line for a promotion at work ahead of time. We’ve got the partners coming over for these pre-Christmas drinks and food. There’re a load of other seasonal things we have to go to. But, then again, I wouldn’t expect you to understand, with your spend-your-Christmas-downtime-at-the-pub attitude. You can just rock up at your mum’s for turkey with all the trimmings, like you always do, and bugger off back to your flat when you get bored.’

      ‘I spend all year cooking. Christmas is my day off. I won’t be so much as picking up a wooden spoon.’

      ‘Gran used to cook when we had Christmas day at her house.’ She thought back to previous years, the house full of decorations, friends dropping in, cooking with Gran in the kitchen. Her throat tightened a little. How different it would be this year. ‘Whereas this year, Christmas is entirely down to me.’

      And it had to be perfect. It had to be. It might be Gran’s last. She pushed that hideous thought away before it could take hold.

      ‘So, can you help me out or what? No pressure.’

      Amy grinned.

      ‘With the corner cutting? Hell yeah, I’ll throw something together. That doesn’t exactly help with the rest of the stuff on that list though, does it? When exactly are you supposed to fit having a good time into this? Christmas is meant to be about having fun, not driving yourself into the ground. Rod needs to lighten up a bit, honey. I mean, is it any surprise you’ve ended up looking to hot gardeners and old tat for diversion?’

      ‘I am not looking at the hot gardener,’ she said, exasperated. ‘I am perfectly happy with Rod. I’m not some downtrodden girlfriend, you know. In actual fact, he’s been dropping hints about making it official. I actually like the life I have, the prospects, the plans. Just because you’re happy to cruise rudderless through life doesn’t mean we all have to.’

      Unfortunately her phone pinged into life on the table between them at the moment, and Rod’s text asking if she’d remembered the dry-cleaning was perfectly readable upside down.

      Amy patted her hand, grinning.

      ‘I’ll take rudderless, honey,’ she said, nodding at the phone sympathetically.

      Gravel crunched under Lucy’s feet as she stood in Gran’s driveway in the mid-afternoon gloom and watched a truck manoeuvre its way back to deposit an empty skip as close to the house as it could get. Even bundled up in her parka with the hood up, the cold bit sharply against her cheeks and nose. The sky was white, with the heavy stillness that sometimes comes in the winter, as if it was full of snow waiting to fall. After a run of wet, rainy Christmases, the TV forecasters were falling over themselves with excitement at the prospect of the first white Christmas in years. She turned at the sound of the side door slamming shut, and watched Jack trudge across the gravel in a shirt and jeans. He didn’t so much as shiver as he came to stand next to her.

      ‘Do you not feel the cold?’ she said, stamping her feet to try to stop her toes going numb.

      ‘You forget, I’m superhuman,’ he said. ‘And I finished the ceiling. So if you need to get the estate agent in there’s no danger of them disappearing through the floor when they measure up the attic.’

      ‘Very funny.’

      He looked at her watching the truck driver disconnect the chains from the skip. There was something that felt very wrong about putting an attic full of history into one of those things without a moment’s thought.

      ‘You’re going ahead then, are you?’ he said. ‘With the clearance?’

      She wrapped her arms tightly across her body and held her elbows with her gloved hands.

      ‘I’m thinking more along the lines of bunging a few things in the skip as I go along with my investigation. I can multitask a perfect family Christmas at home, and do a bit of nosing around on the side.’

      ‘Investigation?’

      ‘Into the Christmas decorations we found. I showed them to Gran, and honestly, Jack, you should have seen her. She’s been so weak and frail, it’s all I’ve been able to do to get her to say hello, or say my name. She was so animated when she saw them.’

      She was looking up at him now, full of excitement, her eyes shining, her nose and cheeks pink from the cold, He found it hard to look away from her face.

      ‘Did