"What thing?"
"That thing where you get quiet and your face goes soft and Ben says it means you're having a moment."
"Ben talks too much."
Charlie grinned—a real smile, the kind that crinkled his nose. "He says that about you, too."
The Snowflakes swirled off toward stage left, and the backstage corridor fell silent. I leaned against the brick wall, letting the orchestra's warm-up wash over me—fragments of melody surfacing and dissolving like half-remembered dreams.
My mind drifted without permission. It reached back through the previous months.
May.The board meeting in the community center's back room, all of us crammed around a table meant for eight. Edna Kowalski had read the motion aloud with her reading glasses perched on her nose, and I'd sat there certain they'd lost their minds. They named me Artistic Director.The title had felt like a costume three sizes too large.
Then, Holly touched my shoulder—firm, confident—and she'd leaned close enough to catch the familiar scent of lavender and wood smoke.The town will follow your lead,she'd whispered.Stop looking so surprised. The valley knows what it's doing.
I'd signed the paperwork with my grandmother's fountain pen.
June.Ben's workshop doubled in size, the new addition smelling of fresh-cut lumber. I'd helped him install the lathe—or rather, I'd handed him tools and tried not to stare at the way his forearms flexed when he tightened the bolts. He'd caught me looking and laughed, sawdust caught in his hair like flecks of gold.
By July, kids were showing up after school. Tentative at first, then in clusters of three and four, drawn by word of mouth and the promise that Mr. Blitzen would teach anyone willing to learn. I'd watched Ben guide a twelve-year-old's hands along a planing stroke, patient as a river wearing stone smooth.
"Feel that?"he'd asked the kid."That's the grain telling you which way it wants to go. Your job is to listen."
April.Before all of it, really—the beginning of everything that came after.
Apple blossoms drifting across the grass behind the theater like slow pink snow. Ben in a charcoal suit that made me bite my lip. Me in my grandmother's favorite color, a deep burgundy tie she would have approved, hands steady tying it for once in my life.
Holly had officiated, her reindeer-bell earrings chiming whenever she moved her head. She'd spoken about roots and growing things and how the strongest wood came from trees that had weathered storms. I'd tried to listen, but Ben kept looking at me, and I'd forget about anything else.
Three months of knowing someone shouldn't be enough to promise forever. But the valley had its own timeline, and I'd stopped arguing with it.
The theater lights had flickered twice during our vows—a gentle pulse, like a heartbeat agreeing with us.
I'd laughed through my tears. Of course,the magic would interrupt. It couldn't just let us have a normal moment.
Ben squeezed my hands and whispered,"Think that counts as a blessing or an objection?"
"Knowing this place? Both."
August.Late nights on the porch with the cicadas sawing their endless summer song. Ben's fingers tracing patterns on my bare back—lazy, unhurried. I'd asked him once what he was drawing.
"Marks,"he'd said."For keeping. For staying. For this."
The clarinet in the pit found its tuning note, pulling me back to the corridor, the brick wall solid against my shoulder blades. Somewhere nearby, a stagehand called a five-minute warning.
I pushed off from the wall. The memories didn't weigh me down. They provided ballast, like sand in a ship's hold—keeping me level.
I slipped between two flats painted to look like a Victorian parlor and found my favorite gap in the stage-left curtain. The velvet was worn thin there from decades of nervous performers doing exactly what I was doing—stealing one last look at the house before the chaos began.
The theater had been full for an hour already. Yuletide Valley took Christmas Eve performances seriously, arriving early with thermoses of cocoa and programs they'd study like scripture.
I found Marcus almost immediately. Front row center, exactly where I'd expected him.
He looked like a different child from the hollow-eyed boy who we'd visited in the hospital last Christmas. His cheeks had filled out, softening the angles that illness carved too sharply. Dark hair curled past his ears now, thick and unruly, and he kept pushing it out of his eyes with an impatient gesture that made me smile.
He was fidgeting—bouncing one knee, craning his neck toward the curtain, and vibrating in his seat with the energy of a kid who couldn't wait for something wonderful to start.
His best friend, Ryan, sat beside him. I watched Ryan lean over and whisper something, one hand cupped around his mouth for secrecy, and Marcus's face split into a grin so wide it probably hurt. Whatever the joke was, it sent both of them into the kind of silent, shaking laughter that got worse the more you tried to stop it.
