Page 5 of The Christmas Stroll

Lucy paused. The kind of pause from someone who had known Maggie all her life and understood the difference between honesty and reassurance. When she spoke, her voice was careful. “It’s not a disaster. Yet.”

The ‘yet’ sat in the air between them like a third person on the call.

They said goodbye and Maggie lowered the phone. She checked the time; five minutes until the mayor’s speech. She should cue the entrance, make sure the AV tech was ready, confirm the mic was live. She had a job to do, an event to finish, a professional reputation that depended on everything running exactly as planned.

Everything under control.

Maggie quickly opened the ferry app on her phone.

Winter crossings to the island were a lot thinner than the summer ones, the boat a slower slog across the Sound in December, but there was one that left Hyannis early enough on Monday to put her on Nantucket by mid afternoon.

She could sacrifice a few days before the Boston festive events rush truly kicked in, and her trusty assistant Eloise could man the fort in the meantime.

Plus, Maggie was long overdue a home visit in any case. She wouldn’t stay for The Stroll itself - not nearly enough time to sacrifice for that - but she would at least do what she could to help salvage the situation as things stood.

Or at least, as much her infuriatingly stubborn mother might allow.

She booked the Monday crossing. The confirmation came back with a cheerful little illustration of the ferry, a snowflake, and a wish for happy holidays.

Don’t count on it.

Behind her, the carolers reached the end of their song, and the room broke into applause, warm and easy, the sound of a party that had no idea anything was wrong.

Maggie slid the phone back into her dress pocket, smoothed the green silk over her hip, then pushed back into the light, the cinnamon and the sparkle, to complete the evening she had created.

She had a lot to wrap up this December.

Chapter 3

The wind off the Sound found Maggie the moment she stepped down the gangway, cold and clean and full of salt, and she lifted her chin into it the way she had every winter of her life on Nantucket.

Behind her, the ferry sat steaming at the wharf, gulls wheeling over its deck, and ahead lay the island in its December best. She stood for a moment on the cobbles with her rolling carry-on at her hip and her tote sliding down one shoulder, and simply breathed it in.

Straight Wharf had been swept and salted and hung end to end with fresh balsam roping that swagged from piling to piling and smelled, in the cold, exactly like her beloved dad’s flap-eared hat, like the shed where he kept the ladder, like every good thing December had ever promised.

Somebody had lashed a wreath the size of a tractor tire to the harbormaster’s shack. Little bulbs threaded through it glowed amber even in daylight, and Maggie felt her chest do what it always did the first minute she was back on the island; that lift and catch, that undertow of belonging she had spent over fifteen years in Boston learning to talk herself out of.

She hauled the carry-on over the seam between the wharf and the top of Main, and let the whole street open up in front of her.

Disagreement aside, the Stroll committee had clearly been busy. The great elms stood bare and enormous overhead, and strung between the old lamp posts, garland looped in long green scallops, laced through with clusters of red winterberry and tied off at each post with a bow of wide gold ribbon that lifted and turned in the wind.

Every shopfront window glowed. The chandlery had filled its bay with a village of gingerbread houses under fake snow. The new bookshop, Bookmark, had banked its window in fairy lights, and open festive-themed picture books.

The new owner of Sea Glass Bridal - recently-deceased Nantucket stalwart Ellen Doyle’s old place on the corner, Maggie noted with a bittersweet smile - had frosted its panes and lettered SANTA ARRIVES SATURDAY 2PM in looping white paint.

Threaded through all of it, from a cart parked at the mouth of Federal Street, the deep sugared char of chestnuts roasting on a drum, a smell so completely of this place and this week that it stopped Maggie flat for a second; fifteen years old again with mittened hands and her whole life ahead of her.

Then the professional in her woke up and started counting.

She couldn’t help it. It was the same eye Maggie ran over a ballroom before an event kicked off, the eye that saw the listing centerpiece before the guest beneath it did; and it moved down Nantucket Main Street now and started tallying what was done, what was half done, and what was simply … wrong.

The garland on the north side of the street had been hung with care, evenly scalloped, every bow the same. The garland on the south side stopped dead three posts short, the last length left coiled at the base of a lamp post like a sleeping snake, waiting for a crew that hadn’t come back.

Two different sign styles in two different shop windows, she noted, and neither of them matched the third.

Most incredibly, the banner frame over the top of Main, the one that carried the WELCOME TO THE NANTUCKET CHRISTMAS STROLL banner every single year, stood empty; just bare steel cable strung across the sky, and Maggie looked at that emptiness for longer than she meant to.

Outside the Pacific Club, two volunteers in matching red scarves were losing a fight with a Fraser fir. One of them had it by the trunk and the other had the stand, and the tree kept tipping, shedding needles onto the cobbles.