Page 17 of Santa’s Lawyer

“Now, don’t forget the joke,” she said, nudging the floating envelope toward him. “I wrote it.”

“Please,” Louis requested, his eyes glazed over. “Read it to me.”

Avery reached forward and eagerly ripped open the small envelope, pulling out a piece of paper. She cleared her throat. “Why don’t sharks attack lawyers?” she asked, looking at Louis expectantly.

He put his hand over his mouth and shook his head, smothering a laugh.

“Professional courtesy!” Avery finished. She grinned at him, waiting for a reaction.

Louis looked at her and burst out laughing. He walked away, doubled over, holding his stomach, wiping tears from his eyes before returning to her, red-faced. He placed his hands on her shoulders and, still chuckling, looked around the room, shaking his head.

“Did you get any rest last night?” he asked through a laugh.

“Actually, no! I didn’t need to sleep at all!” she sped through her words. “I just kept drinking espresso and eating Christmas cookies—sorry, biscuits,” she tittered, “and I’m still wide awake! Do you want one?” Avery didn’t wait for a response before holding her wrist up to her mouth. “A Christmas biscuit for Louis, s'il vous plaît.”

She turned to him. “It speaks French,” she explained, as a beautifully decorated sugar cookie shaped like a snowman burst into existence with an explosion of gold glitter and frosting. It rotated rapidly beside her shoulder before she plucked it out of the air and handed it to him.

He took the cookie without looking at it.

“Avery—” he said, caution in his voice, eyes wide.

“What is it?” she asked. “Do you want something different? I can get you whatever you want. This bracelet is brilliant. I can—”

He grasped her wrist, stopping her in her sugar-addled, sleep-deprived tracks.

“You have to press the green gem for the bracelet to work,” he said.

She cocked her head to the side and smiled, looking down at where Louis was touching her wrist.

“Oh...oh!” she exclaimed, realization dawning on her. “That’s a good thing, right? If I can do it without the bracelet?”

“No one’s ever learned to wield the magic that quickly,” he said reverently, taking a step back and touching a hand to his mouth.

From the corner of the library, a grandfather clock began to chime.

“Ooh! A bell! That’s great! Well, let me show you what I’ve come up with so far.” Avery sped around to the far left of the wall of words hanging behind the sofa. She turned around to see Louis, still stunned into speechlessness, staring at her from beside the fireplace. “Louis, darling?”

“Yes, dear?” he said softly, looking back at her, his eyes light-years away.

Avery laughed, and Louis shook his head, as if trying to wake from a dream.

“Look here,” she said. “I’ve separated everything I’ve learned about the meaning of Christmas into a few different categories to try and distill it down to its central tenets. I hope you don’t mind, I focused on Christmas movies. Family tradition.”

“I remember,” he said, still stunned.

She walked behind him and steered him over to the couch. “You, sit,” she commanded, turning him around and pushing his shoulders down to make him sit. She used the pen to move the wall of glowing words in front of him like a screen.

Avery’s presentation seemed to rouse him from his dreamlike state. She saw his eyes sharpen as she walked him through her findings.

“I’ve focused on film because there has, as far as I can tell, been a movie made about every significant Christmas story, fable and tale—at least a version or retelling of it. I’ve curated a selection of fifty and broken them down by category to—”

“Fifty?” Louis cut her off.

“Yes, but please don’t interrupt, or we’ll be here all day,” she replied.

He put up his hands in mock surrender, amusement creeping into his voice. “My apologies, please proceed.”

Avery used her pen to hook the end of her outline and shifted her entire collection of notes to the left. In front of them was now a massive wall of text, threaded with red ribbon and bows, like the wall of an obsessive, manic detective trying to solve a Yuletide mystery. Fifty movie titles, in no particular order, with paragraphs and circles and arrows explaining the moral of each one.