Page 8 of The Christmas Stroll

The Atheneum stood at the top of India Street, white and columned and dignified, with a fresh cedar wreath on each of its tall doors, and pillar candles burning in the windows against the December evening dim.

Someone had wound white lights around two young hollies that flanked the steps, and now they glowed against the fading blue.

Maggie went up the granite treads a pace behind her mother and thought absurdly of every summer reading program and youthful rainy-day afternoon she had ever spent inside these walls.

They did not go into the library proper. Helen turned left down the paneled hall, past the marble bust of somebody’s whaling grandfather draped rather indefensibly in a length of silver tinsel, and stopped at a door where a holly wreath hung on a ribbon. She squared her shoulders, smoothed her sleeve, then went in like a woman entering a courtroom, and Maggie followed her.

The meeting room was warm, low-lit and smelled of old wood and the beeswax someone used on the long table that ran down its center. The table had been set for the occasion, water glasses at every place, a stack of printed agendas fanned at the near end, a plate of what looked like The Flour Jar’s famous gingerbread going untouched in the middle.

Around it sat the Christmas Stroll committee, a dozen of them longtime volunteers Maggie half-recognized and vendor representatives she didn’t, and the talk in the room was low and thin and stopped altogether when the door opened.

She took it all in the way she took in any space. It took her two seconds to notice that the committee table was split. Not by any sign, but by the plainest arithmetic.

Down the near half on the left, sat the traditional side, the same volunteers who had been decorating Main Street since Maggie was a girl, and they turned toward her mother with visible relief at the cavalry arriving.

Down the far half on the right, was the other camp, merchant reps and some newer faces Maggie didn’t recognize, arranged with careful, deliberate distance.

A no-man’s-land of empty chairs ran down the middle, and the gingerbread sat in it, innocent and unclaimed.

And at the head of the far end sat Marianne Callahan, her mother’s best friend, and it seemed, current nemesis.

She had a neat stack of manila folders squared in front of her, blazer pressed to a knife’s edge, reading glasses pushed up her nose, and was studying a document with the total, performed absorption of a woman who heard the door open, knew exactly who has come through it, but would not for anything on this earth, look up and acknowledge this.

Maggie almost admired it. It was a masterclass, really. Helen had walked in like a courtroom judge, and Marianne had made herself the one thing in the room too busy to notice court had begun session.

Then Maggie’s gaze went to another seat down the far side to Marianne’s right, and stopped short.

A man sat there with his long legs stretched out under the table and one arm slung over the back of the empty chair beside him. Dark hair, flannel shirt with the sleeves pushed up and the unbothered ease of a guy who had wandered into a well-worn argument he had not started and did not intend to end.

While the rest of the room held itself tight against the tension in the air, he did not seem to be holding himself against anything at all.

Will.

Maggie did the math without deciding to. Ten years? No, the last time she had stood in a room with Will Callahan it had been even more than that, the arithmetic climbing past ten and toward fifteen before she could stop it.

He looked up then, saw her and his handsome face opened, unhurried, into a smile that did not have a trace of surprise in it, which was ridiculous, because he had every right to be surprised.

Because she had every right to be surprised, and instead Will looked at Maggie the way you looked at somebody you saw last Tuesday.

“Hey, Sullivan.”

That low baritone, warm, slow and sexy dropped into the strained hush of the room, and despite herself, Maggie felt it land somewhere she had not given anyone permission to reach in a very long time.

She smiled back. Her best one, polished and composed and entirely under control; the smile she deployed when she needed a full three seconds to catch her feet under her but would not be seen to even need them.

“Will,” Maggie stated. Just his name. It came out even. “Long time.”

Chapter 6

For a beat, that was the extent of it. The committee’s low murmur started up again around them, chairs shifting, water glasses lifted, her mother somewhere off to her left already peeling out of her coat.

He held the smile. She held hers.

None of it seemed to touch the space between the door and the far end of the table where Maggie and Will looked at each other across a decade and a half and did not say any of the things that stretch of years had piled up.

She understood then, that she had walked into this room braced for one difficult conversation and had found herself standing in the doorway of a lot more.

Helen finished with her coat and turned to face the table.