Page 13 of The Christmas Stroll

“I have,” Bookmark’s proprietor said without preamble, “been told that my holiday author signing conflicts with the lantern procession and then told it does not, and then told the procession may not happen at all. I have a novelist arriving on the island Friday; the kind who does not tolerate uncertainty in a bookshop, of all the places on earth … ”

Will set the crate of coffee cups on the counter, slid one across to him and leaned an elbow next to it.

“Noah,” he told him. “You bought a business on a sandbar thirty miles out to sea where the mail comes by boat and the coffee comes mostly by me. Christmas was always gonna kill you. This is just Nantucket doing what it does.” He tapped the paper on the left. “That one’s real. This one - ” the right “ - my mother wrote in a temper. Burn it. Your signing’s fine. The procession passes your door at five, and your author will sell out purely to people who wandered in mostly for the warmth.”

Noah looked at the cup, then took a sip, then nodded.

“You’re very good at this,” he told Will.

“I’m really not,” Will winked and looked at Maggie. “Ask her.”

Chapter 9

Maggie and Will continued their way through town, one storefront at a time. The art gallery near the top of Main had propped its door open despite the cold, and the warmth pouring out of it carried the scent of pine and something resinous underneath.

A woman inside was straightening a row of framed winter beach scenes, and Will gave her a two-finger wave through the glass, she waved back and thankfully that was the extent of the transaction, because their mothers had apparently not managed to break anything at the gallery.

Yet.

“This corner …” Maggie chuckled then, because she couldn’t help it, standing where the gallery’s light spilled onto the cobbles.

“Site of a war crime,” Will finished, eyes twinkling.

“You buried a snowball in Adam Foster’s collar. He cried.”

“He’d thrown one at you first.”

“He had not.”

“He had, Sullivan, I was there. You had your hood up and he got you right in the ear, and you looked so betrayed I had no choice but to make amends.” Will shifted the crate to his other arm. “We were fourteen. It got out of hand. The garland man had to abandon his ladder. Somebody’s grandmother took a hit meant for me and I have never fully squared it with my conscience.”

Maggie remembered the grandmother. She also remembered a great deal more than she was going to say out loud, the whole white-blur chaos, the way the entire top of Main had dissolved into a running battle while the adults shouted and the snow came off the awnings in soft avalanches.

And most of all, how she and Will had ended up crouched behind the same parked truck, breathless and laughing, allied against a common enemy for the first time in either of their lives.

Next up on Willow, The Flour Jar had steamed its own front window to a fog and through it the bakery glowed like a lit hearth. Inside, the smell hit before the warmth did, butter and cinnamon and the deep molasses dark of gingerbread, and rising over all of it the yeasty richness of the day’s bread.

Trays of Christmas stollen sat dusted white as the windowsills outside. And there at the counter, in a flour-smudged apron with her sleeves pushed up, another old schoolfriend Clara Morgan was handing out samples off a wooden board.

“Try one,” Clara offered, holding the board out. “New recipe. Dad’s pretending he hates it.”

Maggie took a square of gingerbread, still warm, and it broke soft and spiced against her teeth, a little heat of ginger blooming at the back of her throat, and she made a sound she was not proud of.

“That’s illegal,” she said.

“That’s what I told him.” Clara shrugged and pushed the board at Will, who took two.

Out on the cobbles again, he ate the first one whole. “You remember the first cup of Winterstreet cocoa you ever had?”

“That one night during the Stroll after the café closed,” Maggie said. “You’d stolen the key.”

“Borrowed the key. Dad left it in his coat. There’s a difference and it’s how I sleep at night.”

“You keep saying that.”

“It keeps being true.” He was grinning at the gingerbread as if it had reminded him of something good. “Five of us, freezing and the café dark and locked, and everybody’s parents up to their elbows in the Stroll and not a hot thing to drink for a hundred yards. So I let us in the back and made cocoa on the stove in the dark and you me, Adam, Jess and Lucy drank it standing up so we wouldn’t leave marks on the chairs.” He shook his head. “You had two cups. You told me you’d never tasted anything so good in your life and then you never once mentioned it ever again.”

“I was being polite.”