Page 31 of The Christmas Stroll

Maggie moved away from the table, away from the wreath greens Helen had abandoned mid-bind and the whole wreckage of the last ten minutes.

“Out how? Out sick, or out out.”

“Out out. Double-booked it seems. No fault of ours, they were very apologetic but nothing they can do and I’ve already tried five different options but nothing … not in the first week of December.”

Maggie pressed two fingers to the bridge of her nose. She could see the whole thing without trying, the ballroom she’d walked a dozen times, devoid of festive floral beauty, the round tables, the finance client who emailed in bullet points at eleven at night and expected an answer by six.

“Is the client aware?”

“Unfortunately yes. Already emailed twice and the second one had your name in the subject line, which is never good.”

“No.” Maggie let out a breath. Behind her she heard her mother move. She didn’t turn back. “All right. Let me think. Try the woman who does Marchetti - no, she’s surely booked in December, everyone’s booked in December. Let me handle Hartwell. No apology in the first sentence. Never lead with an apology, it tells them to panic.”

“Got it.” Keys clicking on the other end. “You’re still coming back before the weekend - right?”

“I’m … not sure yet.” Maggie said it more gently than she felt it. “For now, see who you can get. I’ll call you back tomorrow and decide then.”

She hung up and stood a moment with the device in her hand, her two worlds suddenly side by side without touching: the sharp bright hum of the city still ringing in her ear, five hundred covers and a lavish Four Seasons holiday celebration absent of a festive florals and a client who paid her mortgage.

And behind her, the kitchen that smelled of cedar, her mother’s balsam wreath crooked on the pantry door, decades of Christmases pinned to a wall she couldn’t see, and despite her best efforts, a beloved island event falling apart at the seams.

Maggie had basically built her whole life so that the first world took priority. That was the entire point. That was what she’d left the island for in the first place.

“Something important?” Helen mumbled quietly, who’d evidently overheard most of it.

“Yes, a crisis with one of my holiday events next week.”

“Must be something in the air,” her mother remarked archly, but she still didn’t turn back around.

Mind racing, Maggie opened her online calendar but didn’t need to really; she could do the arithmetic in her sleep.

She needed to go back to Boston right away; there was just no way she could sit on her hands while a different kind of crisis - a professional crisis - unfolded without her. Maggie had run enough impossible timelines to recognize one that would not bend. This one would not bend.

She could still hear Eloise’s voice and the client’s, and under it, (unhelpfully) Will’s saying you can’t event-plan our mothers into getting over this, there’s no confirmed load-in time, and she pushed that one down hardest of all.

“I need to … check on something,” she told Helen, then Maggie put the phone in her pocket and went upstairs.

Her old room was at the end of the hall, and her mother had changed almost nothing in it, which had always struck Maggie as either sentiment or defiance. The faded quilt still lay across the narrow bed, blue and white gone soft at the seams from a hundred washings. Her old desk even still held the same cup of dried-out pens.

And on the nightstand, in a plain wood frame, stood the photograph Maggie never looked at on purpose, yet never quite stopped seeing: three people at a Christmas Stroll weekend a very long time ago, the top of Main lit gold behind them, snow on the awnings.

Herself, twelve or thirteen, scowling at the camera in a red bobble hat she’d hated. Her mother in a green jewel-toned coat, dark-haired then, laughing at something off to the side. And her dad in his furry mud-flap hat between them; a hand on each of their shoulders, the way he’d stood, the way Ken Sullivan always stood, holding them all together - the three of them against the world.

Maggie reached up to the closet shelf and pulled her carry-on bag back down.

She packed the way she did everything she didn’t want to feel - quickly and in order, folding each thing flat and stacking it square, blouse, blouse, flats, the charger coiled and clipped.

She moved through it without letting her hands slow, because slow hands were how things got in under your guard. She had learned that at some point without meaning to, the same way she’d learned to reroute a listing centerpiece and never let the room see.

Fold. Stack. Zip the side pocket.

Finally, Maggie looked at the photograph.

Looked at her father’s hand on her mother’s shoulder, and Helen laughing, Maggie smiling in between.

She stood there with a folded sweater in her hands; the snow ticking faintly at the window and the whole warm cluttered house creaking under her, and for one beat Maggie was not a woman with an upset corporate client, a return ferry ticket and a plan.

She was standing in her Nantucket childhood bedroom the night before she left again, the way she’d left all those years ago and pretty much every visit since.