Page 14 of The Christmas Stroll

“You were being a teenager and cold and falling in love - with the cocoa obviously,” he added with a wink.

Maggie let that pass because it was safer, and they crossed toward the wharf where the cobbles gave way to older, rougher stone and the harbor opened out gray and glittering under the winter sun.

“Can I ask you something,” she said then, and heard her own voice go careful.

“You’re going to anyway.”

“How come you’re running the cafe still? I remember - ” She kept her eyes on the water. “I remember back in school, all you ever wanted was to be out in nature. Gardens. You had that whole plan. Landscape design - you said you were going to study it then come back and turn the whole island into something out of a magazine. You had such green fingers too, the only teenager I knew who could keep a houseplant alive - heck the only one who even cared about keeping them alive.”

For the first time all day, Will did not have an answer ready. Maggie felt the pause more than she saw it, a beat where his easy rhythm caught, and when she looked over he was watching the harbor with an expression she couldn’t read at all.

“Plans change,” he said. “When Dad got sick, Winterstreet still needed running. Turns out I make a decent flat white.” He glanced at her sideways and the ease came back over his face like a curtain drawn. “Plus, you can’t over-water a coffee. Fewer professional casualties.”

He was joking. Maggie knew he was joking. But she also knew that she’d stepped on something and that he’d covered it so smoothly that a person who didn’t know Will Callahan would never have seen it.

She let it rest.

“What about you,” he asked, turning it neatly. “Boston. Is the city everything teenage-you hoped it would be?”

“It’s good.” She said it fast. “Really good. I run events; corporate galas, weddings, a museum opening last spring that had a live orchestra and a marquee tent you could have held a wedding inside of. I have a great apartment and a nice car, though I rarely drive. I have a favorite table at a restaurant two blocks from my office who hold it on Fridays.”

“That sounds - ”

“Busy,” Maggie finished brightly. “Yes, it’s very busy.”

She’d heard it back through his eyes. A favorite table for one. A car she never drove because she was always working. An apartment she’d called great without mentioning a single person in it. She had built that whole life on purpose, brick by brick, but had never once stood outside it and thought about how it sounded.

Maggie thought about it now, through Will’s eyes, and it sounded small in a way she didn’t like.

Lonely.

“Anyway,” she continued brisker, and pulled the pen from behind her ear as though there were something to write, which there wasn’t. “We’ve still got the whole harbor walk to sort out and the lighting installation guys to sweet-talk.”

They duly turned back up toward Federal and at another corner where the street bent, Maggie nudged him with her elbow, deliberate.

“This is where it got really serious,” she said, referring again to the snowball fight.

“This,” Will said, “is where you finished it,” and he was smiling again all the way, and the awkward moment closed over as easy as water.

Chapter 10

By lunchtime, the morning’s fixes were if not complete, then at least stacked in a manageable pile.

That afternoon, Maggie steered Will off the cold street and up the shallow steps of newly-refurbished Harbor House Hotel, which she had chosen for reasons she considered strategic, but which he had retorted, ‘more like entrapment’.

The recent renovation had done the old Nantucket institution credit. Where Maggie remembered a dim, tired lobby with a carpet the color of low tide, there were now velvet armchairs the deep green of holly pulled up in twos and threes to a fireplace that crackled behind a black cast-iron grate, throwing warmth halfway across the room.

The long dark-wood bar had been polished to a mirror, and along it stood glass domes over plates of cranberry-spiced pastries, the fruit glinting jewel-red under the light.

Holly and wide white ribbon wound the length of the stair rail up toward the mezzanine, and the whole space smelled of woodsmoke, orange peel and coffee.

Behind the reception desk, stood another island local Logan Calder, who by all accounts had come back to Nantucket after years away and transformed the place, showering it with the care and attention it deserved.

As well as by all accounts, their old aforementioned old school friend, Jess.

“He knows,” Maggie murmured, as Logan smiled a greeting that his eyes didn’t quite match.

“Of course he knows,” Will said. “Everyone on this island knows everything. He’s just too professional to say it.”