“I know socks aren’t a good present!” she said all at once, covering her face. “And I had to guess at your favorite color and what pattern you might like, but when I got them, all I knew about you was that you wear socks to bed like a total weirdo.”
“You got these that day we went shopping?” Kol rubbed his fingers over the soft thickness of them. “From that Sewin’ Love store? The one you sent me away from?”
She nodded, squinting like she was prepared to be told she had ruined every Christmas that had ever come and gone.
“You got me a presentway back then?”
“Technically, it was pretty late in the year for me to be buying gifts for anyone,” she mumbled, “but yeah, I didn’t want you to feel left out. Now I just wish I got you something better.”
“Piper, this is…” He squeezed the socks, all the ridiculously big feelings that wanted to come pouring out brimming in his throat until he swallowed them back. “Thank you, Pipsqueak. I love them.”
As relief broke out on her face, one of her cousins came running up and dumped a box into her lap. “Pippy, this one’s for you.” Then he ran off to dole out more gifts.
Piper frowned at the package. “I don’t remember wrapping this.” She poked at the pattern and looked for a tag, but there wasn’t one, and then she glanced out at the room, but no one met her gaze. Kol watched intently as she finally peeled back the paper. Piece by piece it came away until her eyes lit up like they had that day. “Kol, look! It’s the carousel! It’s got the zebra, and—” She lifted her eyes to look at him, glassy and full.
“I know it’s not practical,” he said, holding up his hands, “but hear me out: imagine your Christmas village just got a grant from the EPA, but it had to be spent on something fun.”
She threw herself over the box at him, hugging him tightly. “Ugh, you’re the best, you know that? When did you even get this?”
He could only shake his head and hug her back. “That was the only good thing about being dragged away from you to go to the gun range.”
Piper rearranged the entire village to set up the carousel, and she spent the day running back and forth just to watch it spin. Christmas was otherwise filled with movies and meals, all of which Piper took part in making but was never alone in doing so. Her laughter filled the house along with everyone else’s, and for once, she truly seemed to play a part in her family instead of being the director, sitting in the shadowy wings and making sure the show went on for everyone else’s enjoyment.
Kol’s happiness was as he expected: bittersweet. She was getting what she wanted, what she deserved, but he fit into that about as much as the dying tree did. He said nothing until it was much later and most of her family shuffled off to bed, but it was time to point out that the spruce was sagging again, their makeshift plan to give it a little extra life a good one, but not long-lasting.
“Oh, it really needs some help, doesn’t it?” Piper wandered up to the floppy branches and then gathered her young cousins around before they fell asleep for the last time in the rubble of their couch-cushion fort. “Boys, I need your help. Can you take all the ornaments and lights off the tree and put them in this big tub?”
Without question, Holden, Noah, and Luke did as she asked, quietly and carefully filling up one of the storage bins. Piper removed the cardinal ornament herself but placed it up on the mantle beside the carousel then turned to Kol. “They’re busy,” she said in a whisper, and he knew what she was suggesting.
Kol pulled the sachet filled with the ground-up ingredients his mother had left him from his pocket. “It’s simple,” he said, grabbing the glass she’d been sipping eggnog out of all evening. He poured in the dust and swirled the cup around. “You just have to drink this, and the tree will let you go.”
Piper took the cup when he offered it, brow furrowed with that crease again, the one he stopped being afraid of sticking days ago. “That’s it?” she asked. “You don’t have to chant in a dead language or cut my hand open or anything? Am I at least going to get stomach cramps?”
“I hope not.”
She frowned into the mug, the firelight falling over her as she raised it. Kol clenched his fists before he could stop her. It would be ludicrous to leave them connected—that would ruin his numbers, it would make a mess of his reports, upend his job, his entire life, and of course, it would kill the tree. Only one of those things wasn’t worth doing, but it was an important one.
As he watched her tip the mug back, he chewed at his lip, glad for every feeling he’d ever swallowed down because this was what he’d been preparing for, when it would be too hard to say the things he wanted because that would only introduce new complication into the life of someone who deserved so much more. She was on the right track now, she had learned to speak up for herself, and soon she would figure out what she truly wanted.
Piper swallowed and looked around the room as if waiting for something magical to happen. Kol joined her, having never really severed anyone from an enchanted plant before, but there was only the smallest tug, like the flipping off of a switch, and Piper pressed a hand to her chest with a quiet, “Oh,” and that was it.
The thing neither of them realized was that Magic had already done its job, it would just take a few more chapters for them to understand.
“They’re finished,” she said, gesturing to the tree. It regained some of its color from the seejia buds, and without the weight of the decorations or the mottled, rainbow lights, it stood a bit taller, but it was clear it had very little time left.
“Let’s go to bed.” Kol took Piper’s hand, and together they went upstairs. He knew she wouldn’t feel it when, in a few hours, the spruce began to die in earnest, and for that he was thankful. She would feel him slide out of the bed though, because of how tightly he would wrap himself around her. She would mumble a questioning sound, and he would kiss her and tell her he would be back, and she wouldn’t know it was a lie until the next morning when she woke up alone.
27
Christmas Magic? More Like Mom’s Unpaid Labor
Relief didn’t come on December twenty-sixth, unlike every year before. Piper opened her eyes and turned off her alarm, darkness staring back at her through the skylight above. She understood, really, she did, and he didn’t need to explicitly tell her. In fact, it was better like this, to wake up and go on like it hadn’t even happened because that was what life was like after Christmas anyway: back to normal.
And normal was…well, it was reliable.
Doc nosed his way into her room and bound up onto the bed, snuffling under the duvet and only finding her.
“Yeah,” she said, voice cracking, “it’s just me.”
