During his time back home, Johnny found his place on the farm. Just like Frankie was Dan's right-hand-man, his go-to for what jobs needed doing, Johnny became Frankie's. It was nice. The little jobs Frankie usually didn't have time for until the end of the day Johnny was more than happy to take off her hands.

He went wherever he was needed, even going so far as to fill in a shift at the farm store, smiling at the customers from behind the counter, surprising fans who came looking for him specifically and found him standing in front of a large sign that read 'NO CELL PHONES!', wearing a Hummel Farms name tag, ready to be of service.

Frankie found she enjoyed having Johnny around to help. She had expected him to trip up her usual flow, but she enjoyed having someone to talk to while she took care of the animals and counted inventory. He got along with all the farmhands. Most of them he had known since he was a kid and the few he didn't, he got to know while playing football with them and some of his cousins at the park on the weekends.

During his transformation from pop star to farmhand, Frankie could start to see what Johnny must have been like as a kid before he moved away.

Johnny's presence had been so constant over the few weeks he had been back home that the Thursday after the gala, his absence was shockingly noticeable. He disappeared after lunch and he wasn't around for dinner. He reappeared on her front stoop an hour after dinner dishes had been put away, interrupting Frankie and her rendezvous with the Ghost of Christmas Future, holding a Christmas tree stand and a small pine, ready to be decorated.

"What's this?" Frankie asked.

Her feet quickly turned cold from the wind blowing through her front door and her finger was stuck in between the pages of A Christmas Carol to keep her spot. Johnny's cheeks were pink from the chill and his smile was bright as he proudly held out his gifts.

"I found an extra Christmas tree stand in the barn loft while I was cleaning it out this morning and I realized you didn't have a Christmas tree for your apartment."

"So you went out and cut me down a Christmas tree?"

Johnny nodded. "I've got extra lights and decorations with me, too."

He nodded to the bottom of the stairs. Frankie stuck her head out and found a pile of cardboard boxes waiting to be carried.

"Uh, okay, then. Come on in."

Johnny carried his first load into the room and retreated back outside to get the second. While he brought up the rest, Frankie worked on finding the right spot for the tree. She settled on the far corner of the room, right next to the door, nestled among her stacks of books, and placed the tree in its stand.

"Perfect," Johnny decided, standing back to get a good look. He dove into the cardboard boxes and started untangling strands of Christmas lights.

"So this is what you were doing all afternoon," Frankie said, joining in on the endeavor.

"Yup."

"You hiked all the way out to the Romero farm just to cut me down a tree."

Johnny shrugged like it was no big deal but just because the tree was short didn't mean it wasn't heavy. And Frankie knew the Romero farm was a good fifteen-minute walk, there and back, longer if you were dragging a Christmas tree behind you.

"I wanted to see the property again, check a few things out."

Johnny pulled out his phone and put on some soft Christmas music and the spirit of the season started to fill Frankie's little apartment. The hardest part of their job was getting the Christmas lights untangled and hiding the dead spots in the back but soon enough the low angled ceilings of the room were started to glow white, green, and red. The boxes of ornaments were the ones Hannah had left off the family tree. They were handmade ones mostly from what Frankie could tell.

"Are these yours?" she asked, holding up a reindeer made out of popsicle sticks, pipe cleaners, and googly eyes.

"I made that in the third grade. I'm surprised Mom didn't throw it out years ago."

Frankie hung the little reindeer dead center on the tree.

"It's nice that she kept them."

The reindeer wasn't the only one of his elementary school crafts. There was a Christmas tree made from a pine cone and glitter, a snowman made out of stuffy, and a handful of others Johnny's elementary school teachers had come up with for students to make for Christmas.

They both leaned back on their hands when the work was finished to appreciate the final result. The tree was cute. What it lacked in height it made up for in ambiance, created a warm, cozy vibe around it. Frankie wished she'd had some of her own ornaments to put on the tree but it was good enough to substitute her own handmade ones with Johnny's.

"Thank you. For doing this." Frankie's words broke the hushed silence the went along with the soft Christmas music coming from Johnny's phone. Johnny smiled and looked over at her, his eyes reflecting the lights from the tree.

"You're welcome."

A peaceful mood settled between them. The warm, low ambient lighting helped. And Johnny seemed happy enough to remain seated on the floor looking at their job well done.

Frankie's question, the one question that had been hovering in the back of her mind since he had shown up at Thanksgiving, chose this moment to press down on her. The mood was too calm, the setting too homey, something in Frankie's bones raged against the peace. And so she found herself asking the unspoken question that had hung over the house for the last two weeks.

"So," she said, pausing to clear her throat, "when do you head back? To work, I mean."

Frankie knew what she was doing and hated herself for it. And yet, she had to ask. She wanted to know how long she had before she had to step up and fill in his role again.

Johnny sighed and the sound floated up to the peaked ceiling overhead.

"I don't know," he answered through that sigh. He took a deep breath, pausing before speaking again. "Things are still getting...worked out. Sometime soon, I'm guessing. We have to perform one last time, I just don't know when that's supposed to be."

His good mood had faded and his eyebrows were pulled together in the trademark Stephens's family frown.

"What's it like?" Frankie asked, wanting to rectify her decision, to change the subject, but also needing to sate her curiosity, "Being in the band, what's it like?"

A wide range of emotions flashed across Johnny's expression.

"Its... it's kind of hard to describe. It's a whole bunch of things."

Frankie decided to simplify her question.

"Okay, well, what's your favorite thing about being in the band?"

Johnny smiled as memories flashed across his eyes.

"Getting to play music for a living. Getting to write songs and have people hear them and enjoy them and understand what it is I'm trying to say."

"And the worst part about being in the band?" Frankie asked.

Johnny's smile faded.

"The exhaustion," he said, sighing again. "The long hours. The constant flights, meetings, soundchecks, constant everything. There's hardly ever any time off."

"How do you get anything done?" she asked.

Johnny laughed but it wasn't from a place of humor.

"We don't. Not really. The only reason we were even able to make our last album was because the label hired someone to travel with us. She recorded our vocals when we had five minutes to spare. She finished the songs we had written when we couldn't sleep. There would be no last record without her. And she somehow managed to do it all with a band that barely speaks to each other."

The sadness in his voice hung over the two of them like a cloud. Frankie tried to think of a way to dispel it.

"What's it like, the traveling?"

Johnny's mood seemed to lighten as he thought.

"That part, that's one of the benefits. We don't get out a lot because we're so busy but when we do, it's amazing. To be able to see all these different places, experience all these different cultures. That almost makes it worth it. Almost..."

He turned away from where he had been staring at the Christmas tree and looked over at her.

"What about you? Have you traveled at all?"

Frankie wanted to laugh at his question but the atmosphere would have gone away if she had and she wanted to stay there for a little while longer.

"I traveled about the state for a while, after my parents sold the farm. I moved from farm to farm, working as a seasonal farmhand anywhere I could get work."

"Is that how you ended up here?"

Frankie nodded.

"The way my mom tells it you were a stray who showed up on their stoop one day looking for a place to call home," Johnny said, laughing lightly.

Frankie could hear Hannah retelling the story of how Frankie had just shown up at their door one day looking for a job and how they just couldn't say no. The story from Frankie's end wasn't as sweet.

"It had been a hard fall that year. No one was hiring. I had just enough money for either a bus ticket or a room at a motel." Frankie's eyes glazed over as she stared at the tree, memories coming at her fast. "My dad knew your dad and everyone in my line of work always talks about Hummel Farms as this haven for traveling vagabonds. I decided to use the money I had left for the bus ticket here. I walked from the bus stop and interrupted their Thanksgiving dinner to ask for a job. Dan remembered my dad. He had heard what had happened to our farm. He let me in, gave me a seat at the table and the rest is history."

Frankie knew the last part of the story, the ultimate truth behind it. If Dan and Hannah hadn't let her in... She found herself telling Johnny what she hadn't told even Dan.

"If your parents hadn't given me a job, a place to stay, I don't know where I'd be right now. I had nowhere else to go."

The memories of the cold, biting wind seeping through her thin jacket that fateful sent a chill down her spine.

"When things got really bad on the road..."

Frankie breathed a sigh of relief as Johnny spoke, letting her vulnerability pass on by. He was trading her pain and secrets for one of his own.

"When things got bad, when I couldn't sleep, when one of the guys were just bugging me, I had this... this dream, this fantasy that helped me keep going."

"What was it?" Frankie asked, turning away from the Christmas tree and the wealth of memories that had just a second ago been threatening to overtake her.

"I had this fantasy of living out in the middle of nowhere, all alone, just me and my guitars. I'd be singing for the pine trees, singing for the birds, with no one around to hear me. I'd be singing whatever I wanted, not something that would do well on the radio. Something that only mattered to me. Somewhere quiet and secluded. Somewhere I could just make music to make music."

He looked over at her and found her smiling.

"Now that sounds like a dream worth chasing," she said.

A/N:

Alright, everyone. Let's say it together now. On the count of three...

1...2...3....

AWWWWWWW!!!

Okay end of day three. How are we doing?

Sound off. Slowly healing person #1, here!

We doing okay? You keeping up? Need a breather??

TOO BAD!! Just kidding. Take all the time you need. Just not too long cause you gotta finish the book. Obviously.