I call it paying attention. Catching all the things no one ever caught for us.
I’ve been watching her for weeks now. Waiting. Planning. All for her. When I saw the seasonal posting go up for “Holiday Character Performers,” I applied that same day. It’s humiliating work on paper—sweating in a cheap suit while sticky-fingered kids pull at my sleeves—but it got me into her building. Got me close. Proximity is everything. A mall Santa can wander almost anywhere without being questioned. I’m just a prop to them, a moving decoration. That anonymity is exactly what I needed.
From my red velvet perch, I’ve mapped her world. I know her schedule by heart—when she arrives each morning, when she leaves, which days she stays late to harass the window dressers. I know she takes her coffee black with two sugars from the gourmet stand by the east escalator at 8:45 a.m. every weekday. I’ve watched the way she taps the end of her pen against her lower lip while she reviews sales numbers, completely unaware she’s begging someone to lean in and replace the plastic with skin.
God, how I’d like to be that someone.
She has habits no one else cares enough to see: the subtle roll of her neck when stress starts coiling there, as if she’s trying to shake off hands that aren’t there. The way her gaze snags on the snow globe display in the toy store window whenever she passesit, just for a second. Those moments fascinate me most—the flash of something softer, sadder, that clouds her face before she slams the walls back up.
I see every little thing. I see her. No one else does. Not like I do.
Our real house looked nothing like the pristine display in that window. The foster home was all stained carpet and sagging ceilings. But out back, beyond the frost-burned yard, there was a cabin. Paint peeling, porch crooked, a bird feeder that never had seed. We used to sit by the drafty kitchen window and stare at it, pretending someone kind lived there. Pretending that if we could just get across the yard, everything would be different.
This morning, I left that memory on her kitchen counter wrapped in brown paper. A snow globe, the only one of its kind. I found some bespoke craftsman online months ago and mailed him rough sketches, scribbled descriptions—details no one else on earth could give him. I made sure he got it right: the chipped white paint. The rickety porch with the swing leaning left. The empty bird feeder hanging off a low branch. The yard too wide and too bare between us and the cabin captured in this globe.
I picture her in that sleek penthouse kitchen, peeling back the paper. The ribbon sliding away, the lid lifting, the moment she sees the tiny cabin under glass. I imagine the way recognition punches through her polished composure like a stone through ice. Maybe she dropped it. Maybe she almost did. Maybe she lied to herself about what it is.
She can tell herself whatever she wants. The cabin will still be there when she looks again.
She’s remembering. Even now, as she stalks around directing holiday cheer she doesn’t believe in, part of her is back at that window with me, nose pressed to cold glass, staring at a life we couldn’t reach. The thought of her shock, her confusion, makes my blood hum. I want to see it in her eyes in person, want towatch her world tilt when she realizes someone else remembers that place the way she does—remembers her.
When her carefully constructed life starts to crack, she’ll go looking for answers. Looking for whoever sent that globe. That’s the point. Instead of chasing her down like some slobbering idiot, I’m laying out breadcrumbs. I’m summoning the ghost of Christmas past, if you want to get cute about it. And when she inevitably tries to find who did it, there’s only one person it could be.
Me.
Overhead, the tinny speakers switch songs, bleeding Michael Bublé’s “Santa Baby” into the air. The flirty croon makes my teeth itch. If I have to listen to this kitschy striptease-to-muzak one more time, I might rip the speakers out of the ceiling with my bare hands.
“Smile, Santa,” one of the photo elves hisses under her breath as she resets a prop to my left.
I bare my teeth in something that passes for a grin. The passing shoppers read it as jolly. None of them see the impatience boiling underneath.
Meredith pauses a few yards away, turning in a slow circle as she surveys the atrium. She’s checking the overall effect, making sure her kingdom looks the way she wants it to. For one heart-stopping second, her head tilts in my direction.
My muscles go tight under the padded Santa belly. My breath stalls. The crowd noise blurs. For a split second, I let myself believe she’s really looking at me. Really seeing me.
Then her gaze slips over the Santa booth like it’s part of the wallpaper. No hitch, no double take. She glances up at the massive tree instead, thumbs something into her phone, and nods at whatever text comes back. Already moving on.
The drop from almost to nothing slices clean.
A hot spike of frustration flares in my chest. My gloved hand tightens around the arm of the Santa chair. The wood creaks in protest as my grip threatens to crack it. I force my fingers to unclench before I splinter the prop and get myself fired.
Easy. Not yet.
She doesn’t know. That’s all. She doesn’t know the boy who used to sleep beside her bed is right here, sweating under cheap red fabric and aching for her. She doesn’t know the man playing Santa in the middle of her mall is watching every move she makes and memorizing the sound of her heels on polished tile.
She doesn’t know she’s mine.
I swallow down the bitterness, let it settle into something colder, cleaner. Resolve. I owe her. And I want her. Those two truths outweigh everything else. If that makes me the villain in someone else’s story, fine. In hers, I’m the one who stayed.
She starts walking away, heels clicking a steady rhythm across the floor. I watch her go, every step a tug in my chest. The urge to stand up, to abandon the chair and follow, buzzes under my skin. I could do it. Half these people wouldn’t even notice Santa left. The line of kids would whine, the elf would panic, management would scramble.
But I already know where she’s going.
Back to her glass box in the sky, with its floor-to-ceiling windows like transparent walls. Back to a showroom kitchen of stainless steel and marble, where the expensive espresso machine only ever has one mug beneath it. Back to a bed big enough for two, three, more—but where Meredith Monroe will lie down alone, convinced she’s safest that way. Convinced no one is watching.
She’s wrong about that.
I’ve been watching for a long time. From bus windows, from the far side of food courts, from a shitty motel across the streetthat smells like stale smoke and disappointment. Every move she makes, every wall she builds, I’ve cataloged all of it.
