Snowbound With The Best Man. Allie Pleiter

an opportunity so tailor-made for Matrimony Valley. Kelly would have to step up and serve as both florist and chief planner for this wedding. A whole week with a fun new friend could be the answer to this busy single mother’s prayer.

      Lulu looked out the window at the inn across the street, where nearly all the town’s wedding guests stayed. “I wonder if she likes ice cream.”

      “I think every little girl likes ice cream.” Kelly closed her laptop. “We do, so let’s go get some.” She pulled the “back in 30 min” sign from its peg on the wall and hung it on the shop door. Some day she’d have a brand-new van and more employees who could keep the store open for her while she was out. Some day she could take her daughter for ice cream on a Saturday without a hint of worry if she’d missed any business.

      With Samantha Douglas covering the elk wedding for the whole region to see, perhaps that day would come soon.

      * * *

      Bruce Lohan watched his five-year-old daughter bounce on the hotel bed. She’d been totally unimpressed with the pile of newly purchased sticker and coloring books he’d just produced from a corner of his suitcase. He’d spent a fortune on activity books and had a stack of tourist attraction brochures as long as his arm, but Carly’s attention was captured by the mountain of flowery fabric on her bed. Flowers and ruffles. Her little-girl fascinations were growing more foreign to him all the time.

      “This bed has so many ruffles, Daddy,” she said as she bounced. “Can I have one like it at home?”

      “I’d never find you in all those ruffles. What would anyone do with a pilot who...lost...his own daughter?” His voice hitched just a bit on the word lost, the way it always did when the ordinary word popped up in conversation. Lost stopped being an ordinary word when Bruce “lost” his wife to cancer two years ago. The thought of losing Carly—even as a joke among a mountain of fluffy fabric ripples—was enough to make his heart momentarily ice over.

      He pulled up his mental checklist of father-daughter vacation activities. “Shall we go for a walk and see how the waterfall freezes over?”

      “Nope,” she declined, flopping down from the incessant bouncing to run her fingers along a pillow’s line of tassel trim. “I’m fine.”

      “Well, then, let’s go exploring for animal tracks in the woods. You can wear your new boots.”

      Carly rolled over onto her back. “It’s cold outside.” She wiggled her fingers up in the air. “My fingers’ll get all numbly.”

      Numbly. Back in Sandy’s last days, Bruce remembered praying for numb. Pleading for God to make the pain to stop so that each breath wouldn’t feel like swallowing fire. Now, he wasn’t sure his ever-present “numbly” was any gift at all. These days, the only things he could honestly say he felt were instantaneous pangs of fear and loss. Pangs that kept poking up in his life like trip wires, driving a need to stay busy that bordered on compulsion.

      Action was the only defense he had. Motion was his best protection against the niggling sensation that one of these days he’d stop feeling altogether. Except for Carly. Sweet, precious Carly. There were stretches where the fierce love he bore her felt like the only fixed thing keeping him upright. The only feeling he still possessed. And yet, even that came with the suffocating ache that his grief kept him from loving Carly well. Or right. Or enough. Losing Sandy had hollowed him out inside. Raising Carly seemed to require so much more from him than he had to give.

      “Dad,” Carly moaned, her blond head surfacing from behind a tidal wave of ruffled pillows.

      “What?”

      “You went away again.”

      How poor was a father’s lack of focus if even a five-year-old could pick up on it? No matter how he tried to hide it behind a busy day of activities, Carly still knew when his thoughts of Sandy’s absence pulled him under.

      It was so much easier to hide at work. The precise demands of helicopter piloting were almost a release from the fog of daily interaction. In the air for the Forest Service, Bruce could be engrossed, analytical, responsive, almost mechanical. On the ground, where he had to be human, everything stymied him. He couldn’t hope to be happy, so he settled for busy.

      But busy wasn’t happy. He had to start finding his way toward happy, or at least away from numb. This trip was supposed to help do that, but they’d been here one hour and already he felt as if he was just spinning wheels.

      “Well,” he said to Carly, hoping he masked his sense of emptiness, “we can’t just sit around. You were sitting in the car all the way here.” He’d tried to make the drive an event in itself, taking Carly up North Carolina’s scenic Blue Ridge Parkway on the way to Matrimony Valley. The plan was that the route would launch the whole trip in a special way. Be more fun than slogging down the highway from their home in Kinston, right?

      Wrong. He’d messed that up, as well. It had been a stupid, misguided idea to give Carly hints that there might be unicorns in the vast forest.

      Carly’s unicorns. If there was anything that stymied him more than his fog, it was his daughter’s imaginary unicorns. She seemed to deal with Sandy’s loss by imagining unicorn sightings. Mom sends them, she’d explained to Bruce when he had asked, breaking the last pieces of his heart into bits.

      Sandy had sent him no such signs of comfort. Or symbols that he was doing okay. In fact, an accurate description of his life would be that it was one big, messy glob of anything but okay. Maybe he’d gain some sign of approval when he did something to actually deserve it. The trouble was coming up with what that might be.

      So, he’d chosen to give Carly more unicorns. He took them on the scenic mountain highway and stopped dozens of times along the way to take in the sights and allow lots of unicorns to make their appearance.

      It hadn’t worked. At. All.

      Instead, Carly grew increasingly disappointed that no unicorns had appeared. How had that happened? How could a little girl’s own imagination disappoint her? What did the sightings—or lack of them—mean? He had no idea, but it could hardly be a good thing that Carly had somehow chosen for her imaginary unicorns to stay in hiding today.

      He’d failed her, and he couldn’t even say how. Way to be Dad of the Year—I’ve already botched the first hours of vacation. Not hard to see why Sandy never let you plan outings, is it?

      And there it was, one more item for the long list of things Sandy did better than he could ever hope to. Sandy could plan one activity and make it a golden, memorable moment. Bruce could plan six and not get a single one to “stick.” How fair was it that Carly—who had already lost so much—now paid the price for his mountain of deficiencies?

      “Hey,” she said, as something caught her eye. She rolled off the bed and bounded beyond him to the window, pressing her nose against the lowest pane and peering down at the row of shops along “Aisle Avenue,” the town’s main street. “Look,” she said as he walked up behind her. Carly pointed to a sign hanging from a shop across from them with a picture of a huge ice-cream cone painted on it.

      “What does that sign say?” she asked coyly.

      It says, “Dad, can we have ice cream?” That’s what it says. “It says Marvin’s Sweet Hearts Ice Cream Shop.”

      She turned to him. “Ice cream?” Her words were as sweet as any dessert this guy Marvin could hope to serve up. “We could have some, couldn’t we?”

      Bruce teased her by faking a yawn. “I don’t know. Seems like you’d rather nap in all those pillows. I know I could use a few winks.”

      “Napping’s for babies,” Carly declared quickly. “You said we were gonna do lots of fun things on this vacation. So...eating ice cream is fun, right?” She returned to the window and let out a squeal. “Look! There’s a little girl like me going inside.”

      As far as Bruce knew, Carly was the only girl her