"You came into the light." He took my face in his hands. "Do you know how long I've been waiting for you to stop hiding in the wings?" He smiled—small, private, luminous. "We did it."
"We're not done yet," I managed.
"No, we're just getting started."
Backstage dissolved into chaos—hugging and crying. Mrs. Brubaker was attempting to give notes and weeping too hard to form coherent sentences. Holly had materialized from somewhere, pressing cups of something warm and herbal into shaking hands, her bracelets chiming as she moved through the crowd.
Alex would need to change out of the costume. There would be congratulations to accept, cast members to thank, and Mrs. Brubaker to reassure. The dragon nightlight waited in my truck, wrapped in soft cloth. Marcus would be heading back to his hospital room soon, counting on a promise we'd made.
The night wasn't over.
But for one moment, I let myself stand in the wings of a theater that had just sung with the valley's voices, and I held the memory of Alex's private smile like something precious and entirely mine.
Chapter nineteen
Alex
The curtain hit the floor, and chaos erupted.
Bodies collided in the half-dark—teenagers shrieking, adults laughing through tears. One of the teenagers' elbows caught me in the ribs as the ensemble swarmed past. I stood at the center of it, still wearing the red coat, accepting embraces with the dazed patience of someone who hadn't fully returned to earth.
Ben's gaze found mine across the crowd.
The noise didn't stop, but it receded—background static, irrelevant. We'd just pulled off something impossible. The tree had blazed. The building had sung. And now we had somewhere else to be.
Mrs. Brubaker was waving her clipboard, attempting to gather the cast for a speech. Ben crossed to her, spoke quietly, and she looked at me—at the Santa suit that had somehow become more than a costume—and nodded. She squeezed his arm before she turned back to the celebrating cast.
I extracted myself from another round of hugs and made my way to Ben.
"Ready?" he asked.
My nod was shaky, but my voice came out steady. "Let's go keep our promise."
The truck's heater fought the December cold as we drove. Neither of us reached for the radio.
Two weeks. I'd known Ben Blitzen for two weeks. It felt like longer—like I'd been waiting to fall on that icy sidewalk my entire life, though I hadn't known what I was waiting for until he helped me up with snow in my hair and sawdust on his hands.
He reached for my hand across the bench seat.
I laced my fingers through his, needing skin contact and needing something real. The Santa gloves lay discarded on the dashboard.
"Ryan's going to be there," I said. "He wrote that letter."
"I know."
"What if it doesn't work?" The fear I'd been holding back spilled out. "What if the magic doesn't do what we think? What if we walk in there with glowing toys and promises, and he's just a sick kid in a hospital bed, and none of it helps?"
Ben was quiet for a moment. The hospital was visible now against the tree line—five stories of institutional architecture softened by wreaths in windows.
"The magic isn't about fixing things," he said carefully. "My grandfather used to say the marks couldn't heal bodies or change circumstances. They only remind people what they already have inside. Courage. Hope. The knowledge that they're not alone."
I turned that over in my mind. When I'd sung for Harrison, I wasn't trying to impress him. I was trying to tell the truth about what I'd found in Yuletide Valley.
"This feels the same," I said. "I'm not going in there to fix anything. I'm going to sit with a scared kid and show him someone he adores sees him and cares."
Ben squeezed my fingers once. "Then let's not make him wait."
The automatic doors parted, and warmth enveloped us—the hospital's heating system working overtime. The lobby smelled of antiseptic and evergreen, a determined effort to bring Christmas inside.
