And did I honestly think I could bring them all here without her catching on? The one person who knew me better than anyone and had “attention to detail” listed first under the competencies section of her resume?
Maybe I wanted her to catch on. That way, I wouldn’t have to tell her myself.
But when I looked at her, it wasn’t judgment or disdain in her eyes. Just wild curiosity and… Was she impressed with me right now?
“Liv, Maren…” The steward of the orphanage came over and thankfully put me out of my misery. For a while, anyway. “Can I talk to you real quick?”
She pulled us aside and shared a problem that would single-handedly ruin the day. But as she was talking, brainstorming ways around it, I glanced at Adrian across the room. He was on his knees, carefully taking instruction about a complicated clapping game from some of the kids. He kept messing up—whether by accident or deliberately to get them laughing—and it had them in stitches.
“Come with me.” I’d showed up out of nowhere and didn’t bother hiding the urgency in my voice, so I forgave the look of alarm.
Adrian got to his feet and spared a furtive look around. “Here? With all the kids around?”
“Ew, no.” I slapped his arm. “Get your mind out of the gutter and just… come.”
We passed the steward on our way to the coat room, and she shot me a dubious look. But I assured her with a nod. Luckily for us, we had the perfect person in attendance to save the day.
“Okay, Maren, my mind is firmly out of the gutter,” Adrian said with a light laugh. “But I gotta say, you pushing me into the coat room like this—”
“Put this on.” I shoved a package against his chest. It was soft, wrapped in brown paper, and a torn corner revealed a sliver of red velvet.
His eyebrow quirked up when he noticed it. “Role play. I like it.”
“Adrian, stop.” I couldn’t help feeling a jolt of excitement at his suggestion. That was definitely an area we’d have to explore. But not now. “Get the suit on, and meet me by the tree in two minutes.”
I swept out of the coat room, closing the door on Adrian’s stunned but mildly entertained expression. The steward caught my eye, and I gave her a thumbs up.
“Don’t think you’re off the hook,” Liv whispered when I met her at the tree. “I want to know everything.”
I gave her a cheeky smile, and made it my business to focus exclusively on arranging the piles of gifts to be handed out. A few seconds later, Ethan showed up, out of breath and rosy cheeked.
“Found this in the rental.” He waved a burlap sack at me. And when I just stood there, confused, he shook it harder. “Props. You honestly think Adrian’s gonna do this without the appropriate flair?”
He filled the bag with gifts and flashed a winning grin before taking it back to the coat room for Adrian. My face was beginning to hurt from smiling. Just all the good stuff. That’s what it was. The connection between them, their connection with me… And then being able to have days like this where—
“Definitely, positively, nowhere near off the hook.” The look on my face must’ve set her off, but there was no way of hiding it.
Besides, I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
Adrian made his entrance by nearly tripping over the tree skirt.
The suit was too big in the shoulders and too small in the legs, which somehow made it perfect. The kids shrieked the moment they spotted him waddling toward the chair we’d set up beside the tree. He tossed the burlap sack to Ethan, who caught it like this was a professional handoff and not a Christmas fever dream.
“Merry… hang on.” Adrian squinted down at the tag of the first gift. “Do I need reading glasses for this gig? Is Santa allowed to borrow someone’s readers?”
A handful of kids dissolved into giggles. One boy marched up with an exaggerated sigh and plucked the tag from his fingers.
“You need help, Santa?”
“Thank you, my assistant.” Adrian gave a solemn nod, which only made the velvet hat slip down over his eyes. He shoved it back up and reached for another present. “Next time, I’m demanding cookies before labor. Learn from my mistakes, folks.”
Even the staff laughed at that. Ethan fed him gifts from the sack with the efficiency of someone who’d accidentally become Santa’s stage manager. Miles hovered near the back, offering dramatic gasps and commentary like he’d been hired to hype the crowd. It worked. The whole room pulsed with that fizzy kind of joy that came from kids believing absolutely everything they saw.
Liv drifted to my side, her gaze glued to the scene. She didn’t comment at first. She didn’t need to. I could feel the weight of her thoughts pressing into the space between us.
When she finally spoke, her voice was deceptively casual. “Do you care about them?”
My head whipped toward her. “What? What do you mean?”
