Page 26 of The Christmas Stroll

Maggie looked back at him and did not step away and could not have said why, and the space between them held perfectly still while the snow filled it in, along with Lucy’s words from this morning.

It never did, though. Did it.

Then Will’s coat pocket went off like a fire alarm.

The ringtone burst out between them, loud, jangling and absurd, and he shut his eyes for a second and let out a sound that was most of the way to a groan.

He set Maggie back on her feet - carefully with both hands, making sure of the ice first - then fished the phone out with the resignation of a condemned man. She saw the name on the screen before he answered it, and her stomach did a slow disbelieving roll.

“Hi, Mom.”

Marianne’s voice came through clear enough that Maggie caught every word of it from where she stood, crisp and formal and entirely businesslike, a woman for whom no snow had ever gently fallen, and no near-anything had ever happened.

“Will. You must tell Madam that the carolers cannot open with ‘Silent Night’ on Saturday, because ‘Silent Night’ is a closing number. Everyone knows it is a closing number, and if she insists on opening with it she may explain to the entire assembled town why the emotional arc of the evening is running backward.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“And tell her the bank steps have far better acoustics than the Pacific Club, despite what her late husband believed, God rest him.”

Maggie watched Will’s jaw work.

“Yes, Mother,” he said again, then hung up and slid the phone back into his snow-dusted pocket.

He looked at Maggie across the two feet of frozen air that had ten seconds ago, held something else entirely.

The emotional arc is running backward.

Maggie felt the laugh start in her shoulders. She pressed both mittens to her mouth, too late, and it came out anyway, a real one, the kind she never let anyone see her take at an event. Shaking up through her whole chest, the release she’d been holding since she’d walked into a committee room earlier this week and found Will there with his legs stretched out under the table looking at her like it had been last Tuesday.

She laughed at the song list. She laughed at the acoustics. She laughed at the two of them, drafted and duct-taping and passing notes for their mothers over the last few days like schoolchildren.

And at herself for the way her heart had leapt just now in the half-second before the phone went, the pair of them standing in the middle of Main Street shaking with emotion while the volunteers looked on and the snow fell gold through the lamplight.

“She has a spreadsheet for the song list, you know,” Will said matter of factly, though his eyes twinkled. “I’ve seen it. It has columns.”

Maggie had tears of laughter in hers. “Stop.”

“It’s color-coded too.”

The laughter wound itself down into breathlessness and then into the quiet after, and the volunteers were already drifting back toward the last of the lights, Sofia shaking snow out of her sensible boots, the college kids arguing about who had won.

The near-thing was gone. It had dissolved into carolers and closing numbers and Marianne’s color-coded columns, and Maggie was glad of it, told herself she was glad of it, better this way.

Safer.

Then Will’s hand came to rest at her elbow again, loose, steadying her over the ice as they turned back up the street, and neither of them said a word about it.

The harbor had come back out of the grey as the snow thinned, and the light was going down gold over the water, catching the frosted cobbles and the amber lamps on the wharf.

Maggie walked back up Main with snow in her hair and Will’s hand at her elbow, and her cheeks flushed pink with the cold and something else, and she found she was in no particular hurry to finish any more Stroll errands at all.

Nor return to the city at the closest available opportunity.

Chapter 20

But reality soon kicked in.

Hatch & Hobby sat halfway down Main between the chandlery and the bank, a narrow deep-set storefront with a bay window fogged to the sills from the warmth inside.