Page 23 of The Christmas Stroll

Maggie started to clap back but stopped, because there was something under the words she hadn’t expected. Will was looking down into his cider, the honeyed light catching the slightest hint of blond at his temple.

“You asked me yesterday,” he said. “On the wharf. Why I’m still running this café. All that landscaping stuff, the plan, leaving to study, coming back to make the whole island beautiful.” He turned the mug. “Like you, I had it all worked out. The city and then my own business someday maybe. I was gone in my head before I’d even finished high school.” A breath. “And then Dad got sick. This place was his whole life, but he wasn’t going to say a word to me about it, because that wasn’t his way. He’d have sold Winterstreet to a stranger before he’d have asked me to give anything up. And the only other person who could’ve taken it on was my mother, who’d have run it into the ground within a season. Because while she can organize multiple events and committees for this whole island, Marianne Callahan cannot, God love her, make a flat white to save her life.” He almost smiled. “So I stayed. I didn’t plan it and I didn’t fix it, and I didn’t have a strategy. I just stopped and stayed and did what I had to. I set fire to my dream so that my family could survive.”

Maggie sat very still.

“I … I always just assumed you stayed because you wanted to,” she said. “All these years.” She looked at Will then, at the room he’d made beautiful with his bare hands, at the gardens he’d never planted now somehow living all over the ceiling. “You never said ...”

“There was no point.” He looked around the warm low room, the tables and the jars and the bulbs, and then back at Maggie, and his voice went even and unhurried. “Like I said, sometimes we have to let certain things die,” he said, “to allow other stuff to live.”

The empty café held its warmth close around the two of them. Maggie sat with her hands round the copper mug and found for the first time all week, that she had absolutely nothing to say.

Chapter 17

The following morning, the snow began somewhere out over the Sound and reached the island the way weather always did here - without announcement - the first flakes drifting down past the bare elms while Maggie was still halfway along the wharf.

By the time she reached Salt & Cedar, it had thickened into something fat and slow, settling on the balsam ropes, the cobbles and the shoulders of her coat.

She stood in it a moment before she went inside, and let the harbor go soft and white behind her. The masts had blurred. The wreath on the harbormaster’s shack wore a cap of white already.

It was the kind of Nantucket winter morning that made even a woman with a to-do list stop and forget she had one. Then the warmth of Lucy’s shop reached out and embraced her through the open door, pine and cinnamon and the sugared bowl of cranberries still by the till.

“Over here,” her friend called out, and this time Maggie found Lucy in the window in her stocking feet, balanced on the low display platform with a length of fairy lights looped over one shoulder and a wooden lighthouse in each hand. She had a pencil behind her ear and a smear of glitter along one cheekbone that she clearly did not know was there, and she was frowning at the arrangement of her ornaments the way a tourist frowns at a map.

“You’re early,” she mumbled. “The tourists don’t come till the ten o’clock boat. You’ve beaten the herd.”

“I like the herd. I’m just fonder of it from a distance.” Maggie unwound her scarf and hung it on the hook by the door. “This all looks incredible, Luce.”

Lucy set one lighthouse down, considered it, moved it an inch to the left, and Maggie thought of her own mother with her pine cones and said nothing.

“There’s coffee in the pot,” her friend urged. “Help yourself. And fresh scones under the dome that our wonderful old friend Clara dropped in earlier. Still warm, which I am choosing to interpret as a mere gift and not a bribe to create a miniature Flour Jar ornament as part of her and James Carlisle’s new branding strategy. Though I’m tempted to do it anyway.”

Maggie poured coffee and cut the scone. It broke soft and steaming in her fingers, tart red fruit and butter and a crust gone sugar-crisp along the top. That Morgan family truly was gifted.

She wandered along the shelves with the mug in one hand and the scone in the other, past the little white towers with their glowing lantern rooms while the snow fell silently against the glass. And waited until Lucy was crouched over a nest of tissue paper, reaching for a strand of lights, before she said it.

“So …” Maggie kept her gaze fixed on the ornaments. She turned one so its painted light faced the window, exactly the way Lucy did, heard how casual her own voice came out and was pleased. “Do you wonder if Will ever regretted staying? On the island I mean. Giving up the whole landscaping thing.” A sip. “He told me yesterday about why he really stayed to run the cafe. I hadn’t known it was because of his dad being sick.”

The rustle of tissue paper stopped.

Maggie turned another lighthouse, and let the pause go on, and told herself it was just her friend considering the question.

“I’d imagine,” Lucy said at last, “there are quite a lot of things Will Callahan regrets.”

The way her friend said it made Maggie turn around after all.

Lucy had straightened up in the window, one hand braced against the frame, and she was looking at Maggie with a mild, patient expression. The glitter caught the fairy lights along her cheek. Behind her outside the glass, the snow came down thick and unhurried over the wharf.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning nothing. Meaning the man’s mid-thirties and still running errands for his mother. Everybody our age has a shelf of regrets by now Mags. It’s called adulthood.” Lucy stepped down out of the window, off the platform, reached for a mug beneath the counter and took a long unbothered sip. “But you didn’t really come here through the snow first thing in the morning to ask me about Will Callahan’s career choices, did you?”

Maggie shrugged and this time picked up a piece of hand-wrapped soap. “I was curious.”

“You were curious.” Lucy said it kindly, which was worse. She set the mug down and looked at Maggie over the rim of it. There was thirty years in the look, and none of it was in the least bit fooled.

“You remember that summer before you left. The last one?”

“Not sure. It was a long time ago.”