One Winter's Night by Kate Frost

Author:Kate Frost [Frost, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Boldwood Books

17

While the weather was good, rather than spending the day at the lodge on Boxing Day, Claudia broke with tradition and decided to move the trip to Perlan in Reykjavík forward. After Christmas Day’s indulgence, everyone jumped at the chance to get out and discover the delights of the famous landmark that overlooked the city with its high-tech nature exhibition.

Without Birta and encouraged by James, Leifur joined them, although Molly got a sense from Jen that she wasn’t too keen on him crashing their couple time. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves though, and it was a new experience for Molly too. They shivered in the 100-metre-long ice cave, took in the magical Arora show about the northern lights, then were nearly blown off the outside observation deck with its 360° view of Reykjavík, before warming up with hot chocolate and open sandwiches in the glass-domed restaurant.

They returned to the lodge after a long and joyful day and everyone, apart from Finn and Alda who had friends over and Graham and Maggie who had retired to their room, settled around the fire in the lounge, nursing festive drinks. The conversation was dominated by the day’s experiences as they laughed and drank. Molly was grateful to be far from home, surrounded by new people. Even after Lils’s emotional revelation from the day before, she and Kat had the ability to talk about anything, which, along with Claudia’s input, kept the conversation flowing, while their easy friendship and bubbly personalities rubbed off on everyone. Well, almost everyone.

Jen was quiet, more so than usual. James tried his best to involve her but with little luck. He laughed and joked, but his smile didn’t seem to reach his eyes. Claudia, Kat and Lils made up for it though.

‘Honestly,’ Lils said, raising her glass of mulled wine to Claudia and Elvar. ‘As I said yesterday, this has, hands down, been one of the best Christmases I’ve ever had.’ She shook her head. ‘Christmas has never been the same as an adult. I remember the wonder as a child and I’ve never been able to recapture that, probably because I’ve never had children. I don’t know, it’s always felt as if something was missing.’

‘Even with children, it’s not always magical,’ Kat stressed. ‘Don’t get me wrong, Christmas was special when my kids were young but it wasn’t always easy. Because being an adult is shit-hard.’ She laughed. ‘I’m not being funny, but being a single parent trying to hold down a job, doing everything on my own and giving my kids a “Christmas to remember” was bloody tough.’

‘There’s always too much pressure to make everything perfect at Christmas,’ Claudia said.

Kat snorted and waved her hand around.

‘Yeah, I know how that sounds when we live somewhere like this.’ Claudia tucked her feet beneath her on the sofa. ‘Iceland does make it easy to nail the festive vibe when we’re pretty much guaranteed a white Christmas, but this place hasn’t always looked like this. We used to run a

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