December 12
When Rosalind woke on Saturday morning, she lay in bed, watching the flurries outside her window. The snow was just a tease; there would be no accumulation. She knew she should take the David Knight manuscript out of her briefcase and read it to make up for her day off, but she still couldn't concentrate on her work.
As she sat drinking her coffee, Rosalind looked through the kitchen doorway at the advent calendar above the fireplace.
I won't open it, she told herself, like a dieter valiantly refusing to cut a slice from a cake that is tempting her.
And like many a dieter, she felt her willpower slowly erode until finally, she got up from the kitchen table, went into the living room and opened the drawer marked with the number twelve. Inside was a piece of cardboard that had been folded into four in order to fit inside the drawer.
Her heart fluttered when she unfolded it and saw that it was a postcard. Would her secret admirer finally reveal his identity? She was disappointed, though, when she turned the card over and saw that nothing was written on it.
"It doesn't make any sense. Why give me a blank postcard?"
She turned the card back to the front and looked at the picture; it was of a street scene in Paris.
"Brett and I always used to talk about taking a trip to Paris someday," she mused.
Rosalind forced thoughts of both Paris and her former lover from her mind as she opened her Toshiba laptop to check her email. While she was browsing through the usual junk mail, it occurred to her to see if she could find the advent calendar online. When she googled wooden advent calendar, she got 145,000 results, ranging in price from under $10 to a $1,125 handmade red Tudor house from FAO Schwarz. However, there was not one time-activated calendar in the first fifty pages of results.
Rosalind came to the only possible conclusion she could. Apparently, the calendar was a custom-made one.
