And yet, it felt as if he’d had no warning. Michael was swamped with feeling. Christmas? Already? How? For a shocking moment he could smell the tang of pine, and his mother’s pies baking, his father’s aftershave. He could hear his brother’s laughter, the ripping of tissue…the sensation of loss and of loneliness nearly knocked him off his feet.

And the question that burned in him, that made him toss and turn at night, that made him pace the floor, that made him drink too much beer and stare for hours at a TV screen in an effort to shut it out, was suddenly right there on his tongue. He tried to bite it back but it felt as though the question was going to strangle him if he did not ask someone, say the words, finally, out loud.

“How will I survive?” Michael Brewster said. His voice seemed normal enough, but an icy wind picked that moment to howl, and to turn his voice into a desperate whisper.

It was as he thought, as he dreaded: there was no answer to that question.

Still, Mr. Theodore touched his arm, and he found himself looking into eyes that were blue and ageless and full of strength and compassion.

“Find someone in more pain than you,” the old man said firmly, “and help them.”

Michael expelled his breath. An impossible solution. No one was in more pain than him. No one.

He said gruffly, “Where do you keep your Christmas lights?”

As it turned out, Mr. Theodore kept his Christmas lights in his garage. As it turned out, he kept enough outdoor Christmas decorations to rival Santa Claus. There were strings and strings and strings of house lights, acorn wreaths for the windows and doors, an electric waving Santa and a complete set of reindeer for the roof. There were life-size models of Mary and Joseph, a lean-to stable to house them and a donkey, for the front yard.

Michael was wrestling with that two-hundred-pound donkey when Mr. Theodore appeared and handed him a neatly folded piece of paper.

“What we talked about earlier,” he said. He gave the plywood donkey a happy pat, as if the damned creature lived, which Michael had been beginning to suspect. Then Mr. Theodore shivered, looked at Michael’s bare arms, shook his head and disappeared back inside his house.

What had they talked about earlier?

With the first snow of the year falling, imperious to the Michigan wind most people would have found impossibly bitter, Michael glared at the paper. He needed a lifeline, not a quote from the Bible, or the Dalai Lama or Thoreau or whoever Mr. Theodore was currently fascinated with. Still, he curbed the desire to crumple the paper and throw it away unread. Mr. Theodore, after all, had not given him poetry, or Bible verses or Thoreau so far. Maybe there was something on this paper he could hold on to. He opened it with the rough impatience of a man afraid to hope.

What was written there was a scrawled address at the east end of Washington Avenue. Michael recognized it as being in the rough part of Treemont, down by the old abandoned flour mill. Underneath the address was written a name.

Michael remembered their conversation from earlier. Find someone in more pain than you and help them.

As if, he thought cynically.

Still, the words printed untidily on the paper intrigued him. Pulled at him. The words said The Secret Santa Society.

Thirty-nine days until Christmas…

“I need an elf,” Kirsten Morrison said into the phone, “and not the one you sent me last year. I shouldn’t be fussy about a free elf? He got drunk and fell off the sleigh.”

A shiver went up and down her spine, she told herself only because the front door had opened, letting that chill breath of November in.

“A shortage of elves? Oh, a shortage of volunteer elves. So, what would I have to pay for an elf who wouldn’t get drunk and fall off the sleigh?” She said it as if she had money to spare for an elf, which she didn’t.

“Five hundred dollars? Are you kidding me? That’s robbery! What kind of person would rob Santa?”

She peered out her office door to see who had come in. There was no clear line of vision anymore. Once a small market, the front part of her space was now crammed with toys. Sixteen tricycle boxes had arrived this afternoon and were practically blocking the front door.

Trikes that had to be assembled at some point, she made a quick mental note. That was still far down the priority list. She caught sight of her visitor and involuntarily drew in her breath, suddenly not sure it was the air that had chilled her.

He was a big man, maybe a hair under six feet, but with astounding breadth across the shoulders that he brushed snow from. He wore no gloves though winter had decided to arrive last night with a vengeance, and even peering past obstacles she noticed his hands.

Strong hands, capable hands. Hands that could make a woman aware that she was alone, and that there were things, no matter how fiercely independent she became, that she was just never going to be able to do.

He was that kind of man, all right. The kind of man who made a woman suddenly and acutely aware of yearnings she could manage to keep secret—even from herself—most of the time.