"Nothing. Just..." He shook his head slowly. "You look right. Not like you're wearing a costume. Like you're wearing something that was always meant to be yours."
He crossed to me and reached for the coat's collar, adjusting where it had folded under during my dressing. His fingers worked with quiet competence.
"Beard next," he said. "Hold still."
He retrieved it from the counter—not a synthetic prop beard, but a good one, made of something soft and real that Noel'sfamily had maintained for generations. Ben positioned it with practiced care, securing the elastic behind my ears and adjusting the fall of the white hair until it lay naturally against my chest.
"The trick is not fighting it," he murmured, his breath warm against my cheek. "Let it settle. It knows where it wants to be."
"Is that advice for the beard or for me?"
"Both." His hands rested on my shoulders. "How are you feeling?"
I considered the question. My pulse was elevated but steady. My thoughts were clear. The dread that had pooled in my stomach before every audition for the past year—that sick premonition of impending failure—was conspicuously absent.
"It's not stage fright this time," I said. "It's something else."
"Something you can work with?"
I met his eyes in the mirror. He stood behind me, hands resting on the shoulders of the Santa coat, sawdust still caught in his hair. Solid. Patient. Looking at me like I was something precious and impossible, a restoration project he couldn't quite believe had come together.
"I think so," I said. "I feel like I'm about to do something I was always supposed to do. Not performing it. Doing it."
"That's because you are. Those kids out there aren't going to see Alex Garland playing Santa. They're going to see Santa. The real one. The one who listens."
"Ben—"
"I mean it." His voice dropped lower, rougher. "I've watched you with Charlie, Sophie, and Marcus. You don't perform for them. You see them. That's not technique. That's you."
I didn't have words for what moved through me then. Gratitude felt too small. Love felt too new, too raw to speak aloud. I settled for leaning forward, pressing my forehead to his, breathing the same air for a moment while the chaos of the theater hummed distantly through the walls.
"If it gets too much out there," he said, "look for me. I'll be in the wings."
"I know."
"Not because you'll need rescuing. Because I want to see it." He pulled back enough to look at me properly. "I want to watch you become what you already are."
The five-minute call crackled through the ancient intercom system, Mrs. Brubaker's voice barely recognizable through the static. Ben stepped back, but he reached for my hand and squeezed once.
"Ready, Santa?"
I touched the spot where the cherry carving rested against my heart.
"Ready."
The wings smelled of sawdust and fresh paint and something older—the accumulated decades of anticipation that had soaked into these boards, every opening night layered over the last. I stood in the shadows of stage left, watching the house through a gap in the curtain.
Full. Every seat taken.
The audience shifted and murmured, a living thing settling into itself. I spotted Mrs. Kolchek in the third row, the one whose porch railing Ben had painted one shade too dark. She was unwrapping a cough drop with elaborate care, as if the crinkle of cellophane might disturb a show that hadn't started yet.
Scarves and coats draped over chairbacks. Programs rustled. Somewhere near the back, a baby fussed briefly before subsiding. The Yuletide Valley community had turned out in force for entertainment and for tradition.
In the front row, just off center, Noel sat with his crutches propped against the seat beside him. He caught me looking and touched two fingers to his chest, then pointed at me.
"Big crowd." Charice appeared beside me, peering through a gap in the curtain. "Bigger than last year."
"Nervous?"
