Page 47 of The Christmas Stroll

“Look at me,” she said. “I’ve cried twice already today. I never cry.” She tucked Lucy’s now-ruined tissue into her pocket and looked back up the street, to the place where the crowd had folded over her mother and Marianne. “I came home to fix things, you know. That was the plan. I had a whole plan. The Stroll, then the friendship, and Mom’s reputation, which she’d have told you was in no danger at all right up until the moment it went over the edge.” She shook her head. “I planned to engineer the whole thing back into shape by Tuesday and catch the Wednesday ferry.”

“You know what they say about the best laid plans ….”

“And in the end, they did it themselves. Of course they did. Standing there in the snow eating stollen as if nothing at all ever happened.” Maggie watched a strand of loose garland turn on its thread outside the the toy store, the little train still going round and round behind the glass. “You were right. All week we kept trying to get them in the same place and it didn’t move them an inch. And then it turned out the only thing that was ever going to work was the two of them admitting the actual truth. To themselves.”

Maggie stopped there, and left it there, because she’d heard the actual truth in Helen’s kitchen last night and a sentence she was fairly sure Will had heard some version of from his own mother, but she still didn’t know how much of it he knew. “Whatever it might be,” she added. “You told me that.”

“I did tell you.”

“You were insufferable about it, actually.”

“I was correct about it. There’s a difference. It’s subtle.”

She glanced sideways at him then. Will was looking down the street toward the wharf, the light silvering the blond at his temple, and the melting snow in his dark hair.

The laugh lines at the corner of his eyes had again gone still, and Maggie let the look hold a second past where it needed to hold, and then another, and he didn’t turn, and she didn’t turn away, and the thought sat there in the cold air between their shoulders without either of them touching it.

Maybe that was the trick. Maybe you didn’t fix a thing by managing it. Maybe you fixed it by recognizing the actual thing, the thing underneath, out loud, with the person who needed to recognize it too.

Maggie could feel the shape of it, right there, warm and terrifying, close enough to reach.

Behind them the last handbell rang once, clear and bright over the harbor, and went quiet. A little way off toward the water a knot of children shrieked with laughter, chasing each other through the thinning crowd with their candy canes held aloft, and their parents called after them without any real hope of being obeyed.

The cider cart on the corner had run itself dry and gone cold, but the smell of it hung on anyway, clove and apples and cinnamon, threaded through the deep sugared molasses breath still lifting out of The Flour Jar.

The town glowed green and gold and doubled itself in the dark shop windows, exactly the way it had looked in the photograph on Maggie’s nightstand, exactly the way it had looked every December of her childhood, while she and Will Callahan stood in the middle of everything they had spent this week trying to save, and Maggie thought she could stand here in this snow, next to this man, for the rest of her life.

The thought was right there. She had only to say it.

Maggie didn’t say it.

And Will, who had a joke for everything and had just delivered one from a stage to three thousand people, didn’t say it either.

The star burned over the water. The snow came down between their shoulders, filling the two feet of air that wasn’t two feet anymore. The moment stretched out long and warm and unbroken, and neither of them broke it, because breaking it would have meant saying it.

And it turned out that the Maggie and Will, standing here at the tail end of everything, were every bit as bad at this stuff as their mothers had been.

Chapter 37

Maggie was the one who finally let out a breath, and watched it fog and thin away over the emptying street.

“I should probably go and collect Helen,” she said, “before she and Marianne start arguing again after too much cider. Did you see how much of they’ve gotten through already?”

Will turned, the line of his mouth going. “I saw. Mom was very generous with her toasts.”

“If I leave Helen out here for much longer she’ll be conducting the carolers by ten, and challenging the harbormaster to a duel by eleven.” Maggie reluctantly pulled her collar up against the snow. “Somebody has to make sure she gets home in one dignified piece, and it’s contractually obligated to be me, because I’m the daughter, and because there’s no one else stubborn enough for the job.”

“At least you come by it honestly.”

“Don’t you start.” But she was smiling, the real one, and she let him see it, which she found she didn’t mind him seeing. “Goodnight, Will.”

“Night, Sullivan.” But he didn’t move off, and she didn’t either, not for a beat and then a beat more.

Until finally Maggie made herself turn and go, up the glowing length of Main toward the place where her mother’s laughter was still carrying back over the heads of the crowd, and she did not look behind her, though she knew, the whole way up the street, that he was still standing there watching her go.

The walk home took twice as long as it should have, because Helen stopped to admire every lamppost wreath and to inform Maggie at each one, that this was the last year she’d do them all by hand, something she had said every December for as long as Maggie could remember.

The town went quiet behind them, the glow of the celebrations dropping away until it was only the two of them on the white sidewalk, their boots crunching, their breath going up together in the cold, the harbor throwing its last low amber light over the rooftops behind.