Excerpt from ARE YOU STAYING, MANDY BOYLE? by Melanie Moore:
Angel took one look at my face and gathered me in his arms. All the sadness I’d suppressed in the anonymity of the subway rushed out in a flood of tears.
“Mija! Are you hurt?”
“No, no. Not . . . like that.”
Angel frowned. His hair was thinning, his face deeply lined, but he was still the man who had showed up and rescued my mother from her own tragedy when her Aunt Maureen died. And because Angel rescued her, he rescued me.
I wished, just once, that I could be rescued again.
Angel sighed. “Come in. Sit, sit.”
I sat on the couch. He’d put the tree up, a skinny fake thing that needed to be replaced, but my mom had bought it, so it stayed.
Then I asked him, “Do you really want to move to Somers Point and live with Tía Maria?”
Angel made a pssh sound. “I won’t leave you. It’s fine.”
For him to just decide that made me feel like a child. It was so much easier to be a child. But I knew Angel belonged with his sister. Not rattling around an apartment with grown-up kids who couldn’t afford anything else.
“Mija. Why are you so sad?”
I laid my head on his shoulder. “I just want everything to be easier.”
He rested his cheek on my forehead. “Sí, sí, mija, entiendo. Entiendo.”
I hadn’t known how hard my mom’s life had been, and then Aunt Maureen died, and I started seeing bills marked with a red stamp. But my mom would tell me that we could do the tough stuff and make me believe everything would be okay.
Then Angel moved to the Heights from Puerto Rico and shopped at the bodega where my mom worked part-time in the evenings. He asked her out the first time he saw her, but my mom’s Spanish was exclusively bodega transactional, and she laughed him off. So he learned how to ask in English.
I held his hand, calloused from the construction work he’d done all his life. He deserved to be able to move on.
“I’m going to figure something out, Angel,” I told him. “You don’t need to take care of me anymore.”
He held me tighter. “You took care of my Susie when I couldn’t.”
“You had no choice; you had to work.”
“I want to take care of you, mija.”
But he always had. Always. I wanted so badly to make it better, for him—and me—and if I wanted to do that, I had to move on. Somehow.
Angel sat up, pointing to my ballet flats that were now stained with salt and snow melt. “Get some real shoes. And warm clothes. We’re going out, and you are not dressed for winter, mija.”
It didn’t take me long to guess where we were going when Angel stood from his seat on the subway as we neared Penn Station. Miguel was waiting for us on the corner of Thirty-Fourth Street and Eighth Avenue.
My brother put his arm around my shoulders and squeezed. Angel picked up my hand as Miguel released me.
As we walked east, the sidewalks grew more crowded, the vendors more insistent, and the children more plentiful than usual. It was Christmas in Manhattan, and for my mother, then for me, then for Angel, then finally Miguel, that meant a slow, delighted tour of the windows at Macy’s. It had been the best memory of my mother’s childhood, and then she made it ours.
We found the beginning of the story in the windows and peered over some excited children to see what was happening inside. A reindeer with very long eyelashes was supposed to learn to fly, but she was afraid and wanted to wait until next Christmas before she tried.
Miguel pointed at the books stacked up in the window where the reindeer was studying her flying lessons. “I’m going to think about this when I want to give up studying for that license.”
Angel chuckled. “Not as hard as learning to fly.”
To keep her feeling safe, the reindeer’s friends built her a steam-punky whirligig that lifted her up. Eventually though, the contraption was untied, and she just flew on her own. In the final window, it said believe.
The whole message felt a bit on the nose, and it was literally impossible that the Macy’s window designer could have planned the whole thing just for me. But isn’t that how Christmas works sometimes?
We headed for Rockefeller Center. Angel, who remembered that I’d missed my dinner, bought me a hot dog from a vendor’s cart. Delphine’s could not have tasted better.
As we pressed on through the crowded sidewalks, Miguel waved off the Santas and elves offering to take our pictures for tips. The noise and the lights and the people jostling for better selfies didn’t feel like sensory overload. It felt peaceful.
The tree had just been lit on Wednesday, so the skating rink was full. My brother wedged us into a spot by the railing, and we stood for a long time in silence, watching the skaters, looking up at the tree, arms linked together, Miguel and me on either side of Angel.
I leaned my head on Angel’s shoulder. Eventually he sighed, contentedly.
“Such a nice place to live at Christmas,” he said.
I woke up the next morning with memories of my mother. She had made the tour of downtown our Christmas tradition—it was free, after all, just like everything that was Christmas in New York City. The tree lighting, the ice skaters. The lights and decorations, everywhere you looked. And always, the incredible window displays at Macy’s.
The December before Angel showed up in our lives, it was bitterly cold every day my mother was off work, but she and I finally bundled up anyway to see the windows, ducking indoors to warm up every chance we had. The next year, the three of us went: me, Mom, and Angel. Soon after, Miguel was there too. Then one year, my mother couldn’t make it. She told us to go, take videos, and bring them back for her. The three of us went without her, without joy. After that, we went without her forever.
I closed my eyes to the memory.
My phone rang. The caller’s number was an 802 area code, but the spam blocker didn’t think it was sketchy.
“I’m calling for Mandy Boyle,” a gravelly voice said.
“I’m Mandy. Can I help you?”
“I hope so,” he said. “This is Harley Donovan, owner of The Liberty Eagle. You’ve won my newspaper.”
Excerpted from ARE YOU STAYING, MANDY BOYLE? by K. Ancrum © 2026 by Melanie Moore.
A brilliant debut from Melanie Moore, Are You Staying, Mandy Boyle? will have you laughing, crying, and aching with the frustrations and joys of taking huge risks and falling in love big time.
Mandy Boyle is thirty-five, still living with her stepfather in his rent-stabilized apartment, and still stuck as a copy editor at The New York Times, awaiting the next big layoff. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, but ten years ago, she put her journalism career on hold and moved back to the city to care for her dying mother. Of course, she can’t be salty about that.
Then everything changes when Mandy wins a one-hundred-plus-year-old newspaper in Vermont AND the apartment over it—a New Yorker’s dream! The only catch? She must run The Liberty Eagle for one year, and can’t sell it to a conglomerate until that year is up. Sounds great, until Mandy discovers the Eagle is definitely old school, definitely not profitable, and that she is definitely in way over her head.
Suddenly she’s a city girl thrust into a quaint Vermont town at Christmas time, where everyone knows everything about each other. One plus? The mechanic in the next building, Greg Stewart, who keeps trying to sell her snow tires, is very easy on the eyes. Mandy would like to know more about him, but he’s plenty guarded. As she struggles to right the sinking newspaper, she bonds with people in the town, including a young woman who is losing her own mother to cancer, an emotional connection that cracks open Mandy’s own guarded heart.
Through it all, Mandy is drawn to Greg. He just may be her best friend. Maybe the love of her life. But how can two such guarded hearts ever fully fall for each other—especially when Mandy is so sure she’ll be leaving by the time next Christmas rolls around?
Women's Fiction Family Life [ Blackstone Publishing, On Sale: November 3, 2026, Hardcover / e-Book / audiobook, ISBN: 9798228533592 / eISBN: 9788228533752 ]
Melanie is a jeweler by trade, an artist by passion, and is stepping into her soul's calling as a healer of the planet. She has been an avid journal writer for most of her life and has written many unpublished stories and memoirs. Writing has always been a cathartic and healing experience for her and has often served as her therapeutic outlet. When she's not traveling to music and arts festivals in service to her jewelry business, Gaia's Jewel, she resides at home in Nashville, TN with her son, her cat, her gecko and her gardens.
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