Page 16 of The Christmas Stroll

“Margaret,” her mother said, and her voice had gone flat and declarative, every consonant clipped and paid for. “I do not appreciate being ambushed. This hotel has been a personal favorite of mine since before you were born. I have taken tea here, I have celebrated anniversaries here, and I did not come this afternoon to be maneuvered like a chess piece on a board by my own daughter. You have … overstepped.” A short exhale through the nose. “Considerably.”

“Mom - ”

“You may tell me later how clever you thought you were being.”

Across the way, Marianne had since moved. She had in fact settled herself at the edge of one of the green velvet chairs, handbag still over her arm, coat still buttoned to the throat, as though pausing only to make a point before departing.

She spoke to Will without crossing so much as a foot of the polished floor between them, pitching her voice at a level that carried the full length of the lobby space and, Maggie suspected, halfway up the ribboned stair.

“Will,” Marianne said. “I find it extremely telling that you would lure your own mother to a public place under false pretenses. Extremely telling. A logistics debrief. You told me this was a logistics debrief.” She let the word hang there, damning. “I raised you better than this. I don’t know where you learned to be so underhanded, but it was certainly not from me.” Her gaze duly flicked toward Maggie, who blushed.

Will, to his enormous credit, did not flinch. Instead, he leaned an inch closer to Maggie and dropped his voice to a murmur meant only for her.

“Sullivan,” he said. “My mother would like it relayed to your camp that she is disappointed in me personally, that she considers this an ambush, and that my moral failings are not hereditary.”

“Understood,” Maggie murmured back, turned her head a careful few degrees toward her own mother, and matched Will’s register exactly. “While you may inform your side that mine considers herself maneuvered, that the venue’s sanctity has been violated, and that I have overstepped. Considerably. She’d like that on the record.”

“Noted.” Will’s mouth was doing something valiant to stay level. “I’ll pass it along.”

That was the whole insane architecture of it all laid bare in a beloved Nantucket hotel lobby; Maggie and Will relaying grievances between their two stubborn mothers who stood not thirty feet apart but would sooner burn the building down than address one another directly.

Helen tucked her handbag higher on her arm. “I won’t stay where I’ve been made a fool of,” she said to no one in particular and turned on her heel.

At the same instant; the timing so precise it might have been rehearsed, the way everything the two of them did was somehow still in lockstep even now, Marianne moved from the edge of the velvet chair, drew her burgundy coat closer at the collar though it was already buttoned, and stood.

“See you back at the cafe, when you’ve finished,” she said, to Will, indicating that she was absolutely leaving without him.

Helen went out through the lobby door into the cold, chin high, and did not look back.

While Marianne exited through the French doors that led toward the garden terrace, spine straight, handbag on her arm, and didn't’ t look back either.

Neither woman, from the moment they had clocked each other across the room to the moment they left it, had exchanged a single direct word. Not one.

Two doors closed at either end of the lobby within the same breath, and the cold that each of them let in met somewhere in the middle over the hearth rug until it was gone.

While the room settled back into its earlier warmth as though nothing had happened at all.

Logan materialized from the direction of the kitchen with a tray. On it sat four coffees, poured and steaming and entirely untouched, and a plate of cranberry scones still warm enough to fog the underside of the plate.

He set the tray down between Maggie and Will on the polished wood bar without a word, gave them a look of professional and amiable sympathy, and withdrew.

Maggie picked up one of the scones while Will picked up a coffee. The pastry was warm, studded with dark red fruit, dusted along the top with coarse sugar that caught the firelight, and it smelled of orange zest and butter and everything the morning had promised and the afternoon had refused to deliver.

“So that went well …” She turned the scone over in her fingers, examining it as though it might contain the answer to any of this.

Beside her, Will set his cup down on the bar, like a man laying down a weapon after a battle he had comprehensively lost.

“Honestly? I’ve had hostage negotiations go better.”

Chapter 12

Alittle later, the brass bell over Salt & Cedar, Lucy’s gift shop door gave its two-note announcement, and Maggie stepped out of the harbor wind and into a wall of warmth that smelled of Christmas itself.

Pine first, from the boughs her friend had laid along the top of every shelf. Then cinnamon, the deep candle-wax kind, and under it something sugared and tart that Maggie traced after a second to a wooden bowl of cranberries sitting by the till, red as holly berries and glossed with sugar.

She stood on the mat and let the cold slide off her shoulders and felt, for the first time since the two doors of The Harbor House had closed at opposite ends of the lobby, that she could breathe.

Lucy’s shop, more curated island offerings than souvenirs, was dressed to the rafters for the holidays. Fairy lights ran the length of both window frames and pooled their reflections in the dark glass beyond, where the masts down at the wharf stood black against the failing afternoon.