Alex looked at the building—the old brick, the restored windows, the marquee announcing MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET in hand-painted letters. Then he looked at me.
"Ready," he said.
We walked inside together, and the theater's lights flickered once in welcome—warm and golden, like it had been waiting for us all along.
Chapter seventeen
Alex
The truck's engine ticked as it cooled, a metronome counting seconds I wasn't ready to spend. Through the windshield, the theater's back entrance waited—red brick darkened by decades of weather, the stage door's paint peeling in curls that Ben probably itched to sand smooth.
I hadn't moved since he'd parked.
My hand rested over my chest, pressing against the spot where Donner's velvet nose had touched me. The cherry wood carving Ben had given me lay warm against my skin, tucked inside my henley.
"You okay?"
Ben's voice was quiet, unhurried. He'd turned off the ignition three minutes ago and hadn't once suggested we go inside. The cast would be arriving soon, Holly's special tea would be brewing, and Mrs. Brubaker was probably already wearing a path in the stage floor. None of that mattered as much to him as giving me space.
"I don't know yet." My honest answer surprised me. Two weeks ago, I would have deflected and performed some versionof fine. "I came here to help with a holiday show. I didn't expect—"
I gestured vaguely toward the truck bed, where the toys sat wrapped in soft cloth. "Whatever this is," I finished.
Ben nodded slowly.
I looked at him. Sawdust still clung to his collar from loading the toys. His hair needed cutting, and there were shadows under his eyes from the hours he'd spent finishing Marcus's gifts. He was solid and present and completely unrattled by reindeer appearing at his workshop door or toys glowing with combined magic.
"How are you so calm about all this?"
"I'm not." A small smile tugged at his mouth. "I'm just better at hiding it. Blitzen family trait—we're excellent at appearing steady while screaming inside."
I laughed. "Good to know."
"Ask me again after the show. When I'm not holding it together with coffee and denial." He reached across the cab and squeezed my knee once, briefly and warmly. "Ready?"
The theater waited. The cast waited. Children were counting on a show, a community was counting on a fundraiser, and somewhere in the pediatric ward, a boy named Marcus was counting the hours until Santa arrived.
I reached for the door handle.
"Let's go put on a show."
The stage door hadn't fully closed behind me before the chaos hit.
"—can't find the second candy cane, the big one, it was right here twenty minutes ago—"
"—told you the hair gel was mine, Tyler, I literally wrote my name on it—"
"—if someone doesn't help me with this hem in the next thirty seconds, I'm stapling through the fabric, and we'll deal with the consequences—"
Mrs. Brubaker knelt in the corridor outside the women's dressing room, a stapler clenched in one hand and what appeared to be three yards of wayward green velvet in the other. One of the teenage elves—the girl who'd smoothly rescued Sophie's dropped letter during the run-through—stood on a chair above her, looking mortified.
"It unraveled on its own," the girl said. "I didn't do anything."
"Costumes don't unravel themselves, Megan." Mrs. Brubaker attacked the hem with aggressive stapling. "They unravel because someone decided to practice cartwheels in the wings."
"That was one time!"
I sidestepped them in time to avoid a collision with two child actors sprinting past, scripts clutched to their chests. One of them was running lines at full volume: "But Mommy, I saw him! I saw Santa Claus!" The other was cheerfully ad-libbing responses that had nothing to do with the actual show: "And then the elves did a backflip, and the reindeer sneezed glitter!"
