Page 38 of The Christmas Stroll

The café breathed its warmth against their backs. A strand of the dried-orange garland turned on its thread by the door, catching the light.

And Maggie realized their coat sleeves were touching, had been touching all along, dark wool against dark wool, and that she had not pulled away, and that he had not pulled away either, and that the space between them had gone very short and was going shorter.

This time, there was no instinct in her to step back.

Behind that truck on Federal Street they’d been children pretending not to know. Yesterday on Main they’d been two adults with a whole hidden history and half the island watching, and that time, when he’d caught her on the ice, the phone had saved them.

Now Maggie looked at the blond at his temple and the snow melt in his dark hair and the mouth that had gone still on a question he wasn’t answering. And understood, with the same certainty she brought to a room going wrong, exactly what was about to happen, and she did not want to stop it.

Will tipped his head a fraction. She felt the warmth come off him in the cold and …

This time, her phone went off in her pocket like a dropped tray in a silent ballroom - sharp, jangling, insistent, the ringtone cutting clean through the frost-bright morning and the fogged windows and the two feet of air that had, one heartbeat ago, held something else entirely.

ELOISE.

Chapter 29

Maggie’s eyes closed for a second before she answered it. When she opened them, she had the phone to her ear and her voice had already gone somewhere else.

“Hi.”

“Don’t hate me.” Her assistant’s voice came fast and clipped, again the sound of a woman moving through an office at speed. “The backup florist’s cancelled now too! She just called, something about a burst pipe in her cold storage and now we’ve still got forty centerpieces for the Four Seasons gala that exist only in a spreadsheet, no decor, no vendor, no plan, and a client who has now put your name in the subject line in all caps.” A breath. “Maggie, I really need to know when you’re coming back. Because if it’s not soon, then I have to start solving this like it’s mine to solve, and it isn’t, and I don’t want to get it wrong.”

Maggie stepped half a pace away, off the café step and onto the frost-glazed cobbles, her back going to Will and the fogged windows and the whole warm morning, and she felt the register come up in her like a shutter, cool and level and certain.

“You won’t get it wrong. Listen.” She looked down the street without seeing it. “First, the client. Like I always say, open with the fix, not the fault. Second, call the flower wholesaler on Cambridge Street, not the studios, the wholesaler. Forty bundles, low arrangements, you’re not looking for artistry, you’re looking for volume. Ask for Renata. Use my name. Third - “ her thumb moved over the cold glass out of habit “ - pull the loose greenery budget forward and let the room read as abundant rather than half-assed. Nobody at a five-hundred-cover gala counts stems. They count whether the arrangement looks big and most of all, expensive.”

“Got it. Got it.” Keys clicking. “And you’re coming back today right?”

“Soon,” Maggie said. “I’ll call you later with timings. Handle Renata, OK? You’ve got this.”

She ended the call and stood a moment with the phone cooling in her palm and the harbor wind coming up the street to find her.

Then she turned back around.

Will had not moved. He was still against the cafe doorframe with his cup against his chest, and the two feet of charged air between them was still there, cooling now like the phone. He was watching her with an expression she couldn’t have named - not hurt or surprised, just still.

“You’re leaving,” he said.

It wasn’t a question. There was nothing sharp in it either, nothing that asked her to defend anything, and that was somehow harder to answer than an accusation would have been. Maggie looked at him directly, because he’d earned that much and because she found she couldn’t do the pleasant sidestep, not with him, not here.

“I have to,” she said. “A huge holiday gala next week. Five hundred people, a client who pays my mortgage, forty tables at the Four Season as of now, without flowers. My life in the city doesn’t stop because I helped with the Stroll, Will.” She heard how it landed and she didn’t take it back, because it was true.

“I know.”

“But … not yet.” Maggie said it before she’d even decided, and once it was out she knew she meant it more than anything she’d said all week. “I’m not leaving yet, Will. Not until this is done. Not until those two stubborn old divas are standing in the same place remembering why they’ve spent fifty years freezing on that wharf together instead of apart. I didn’t come home to patch a schedule and just fly out while before the job’s done.”

Something eased at the corner of his mouth. “You’ve decided The Stroll is the job now?”

“It became the job somewhere around the wreath disaster.”

“The wreath disaster.” He shook his head. “We defused a bomb by cutting the wire blindfolded, and then someone at the post office reconnected it with a plate of cookies.”

“Which is exactly why we can’t do it like that again.” Maggie came back toward the step, toward him, and the humor was there but the seriousness under it held. “You were right the other night, what you said. I can’t event-plan them back together. There’s no confirmed load-in time for all those years of friendship. We can put those two in the same warm room a hundred times and it won’t move them an inch.” She turned the cold cup in her hands. “So we don’t engineer it. We can’t. Maybe we just … make sure the room exists. And we hope.”

She looked past his shoulder, up Winter Street toward Main, where she knew the empty welcome banner frame still waited against the sky and the wharf star still stood dark, holding its place until the big event.

“Tomorrow. The whole island out in the cold with cocoa in their hands and Santa sailing into the harbor at two, and my mother and your mother somewhere in the middle of it all whether they like it or not. One more day.” Maggie let out a breath. “We’ve got one more day to give them a reason to stand next to each other, and remember what this is all about.”