Lovelight Farms

Luka is Stella’s best friend and love interest, as well as the narrator of the novel’s Epilogue. Contrary to Stella, Luka grew up in a large, close, and supportive family including his mother, Carina, and his father, Leo. Leo passed suddenly one day, leading Carina to move to Inglewild, where Luka would often visit. As he was helping his mother move, he literally ran into Stella at a hardware store. She was also dealing with the grief from losing a parent, and Luka recognized the same sadness in her. Luka quickly fell in love with Stella, and the next time he was in Inglewild, he wandered the streets hoping to bump into her again.

As Luka and Stella’s friendship bloomed, he developed a plan to tell her that he loved her by slowly wearing her down. Like Stella, he did not want to ruin their friendship by changing things too quickly, as he had told others like Beckett and Charlie. In the meanwhile, Luka was always there for Stella, despite living hours away in New York City. He became obsessed with making Stella smile and would go out of the way to do so with silly traditions like bringing her a pine air freshener every time he came into town and secretly buying them in bulk.

Outwardly, Luka always appears happy and friendly, yet Stella also knows that he still deeply grieves his father, though he never talks about him. When she finally asks him about Leo one day, Luka starts to open up, and the Epilogue shows him thinking about Leo and handling his grief with Stella’s help. Though Luka’s devotion to Stella is his main characteristic, he cares deeply about his friends and family as well and wants the best for everyone. While Stella changes, Luka remains mostly a static character who gets everything he had been slowly working toward at the end of the novel.

Beckett and Layla are Stella’s business partners at Lovelight Farms and become part-owners of the farm by the end of the novel. Beckett is in charge of the actual farming at Lovelight Farms, and he works hard to care for the Christmas trees, especially once a large group of them seems to become sick out of nowhere. Though he comes from a large, close-knit family, Beckett is far from being a people person and prefers the solitude of working at the farm. Though he has a rough exterior, Beckett is kind and caring, as evidenced by his adoption of the cats that live in the farm’s barn. Layla is a foil to Beckett; whereas he appears tough and reclusive, Layla is exuberant and friendly. She runs the farm’s bakehouse and is renowned in Inglewild for her pastries and hot chocolate. She is often a beacon of wisdom for Stella, who learns from Layla’s openness and willingness to tell the truth.

Layla and Beckett are far more clearsighted than Stella in many situations, though just as generous, if not more. They both teach her a lesson about letting others help when they offer to buy part of the farm to keep it afloat, taking major pay cuts so that Stella can get backpay for the paychecks she refused so that the farm workers could be paid. Though their actions affect this major plot point, Beckett and Layla are more minor characters in Lovelight Farms. However, their lives and relationships are explored in greater detail later in the Lovelight series, when Beckett confronts his affair with Evelyn St. James in In the Weeds and Layla finds love with the minor character Caleb Alvarez in Mixed Signals.

Evelyn is a famous destination and hospitality influencer with over a million followers on her social media platforms. She hosts a contest that Stella enters, in which she could win the farm $100,000 and major publicity from Evelyn’s famed accounts. However, Evelyn has grown tired of social media and the often fake stories that come with it. She studied to be a journalist, so she cares mostly about what is really happening in the places she covers. Evelyn feels that Lovelight Farms is special, and it reminds her of why she loves to write and travel. Yet when she gets to the farm, she is also surprised to see Beckett, with whom she had an affair six months earlier and left without an explanation. Evelyn ultimately teaches Stella a lesson about honesty when she reveals that she knows that Stella and Luka’s relationship is fake, leading them to be disqualified from the contest. Though Evelyn is a minor character in Lovelight Farms, her relationship with Beckett is later explored in Borison’s In the Weeds.