Page 50 of The Christmas Stroll

The two things sat there in the same breath, the whole warm island she had just found her way back to, and the city life, five hundred covers deep that was still waiting, patiently, for Maggie to choose it again.

Chapter 39

Winter Street held the calm quiet the morning-after gifts once a crowd from the night before has gone home.

The snow had since stopped and now it lay unspoiled along the cobbles, bright white in the early morning light, imprinted only here and there by the tracks of a gull.

Maggie wandered down it with her bag in one hand and her breath going up ahead of her, past the shuttered shops still wearing their festive garland, past the window boxes stuffed with evergreen cuttings gone stiff with frost.

Winterstreet cafe’s windows had fogged themselves blind from the warmth inside, and the dried orange slices Will had hung along the frames turned on their threads, throwing their scent into the cold.

Inside, the warmth came up to meet her. At this early hour, the room was dim, low-ceilinged and empty, the Edison bulbs strung along the beams burning down soft and amber onto the worn floorboards. The whole of it smelled of dark roast and cinnamon and something buttery from The Flour Jar awaiting in the case.

The chalkboard above the counter had been half wiped, yesterday’s looping offerings smeared to ghosts, and the round tables sat wiped and bare, the mismatched chairs pushed in.

It was the café on a Sunday morning before the café opened, the calm before the storm that belonged to the person who ran it, and Maggie felt like she’d walked in on something she wasn’t quite meant to see.

He was behind the bar with his sleeves shoved up, moving through the early work with the ease of a proprietor who had done it ten thousand mornings - a rag over the steel, the grinder hopper filled, the mugs coming down off the shelf one at a time and stacked, thick ceramic, no paper.

Will looked up when the bell rang, and whatever was on his face when he saw her, he let it be there a second before he covered it.

“You’re up early,” he greeted.

“So are you.”

“I’m always up this early. It’s my job.” He set another mug on the stack. “Whereas you’re up on purpose, on a day you don’t have to be.”

Maggie set her bag down beside a stool at the counter, and she saw him clock it - the bag and what it meant - and she climbed onto the stool and folded her hands on the wood before he could say anything. “I’m on the first crossing,” she said. “I wanted to come by beforehand.”

Will went still for a beat. It was there and gone, the pause in his hands, a held breath she felt more than saw, and then he set the mug he was holding down on the steel with a soft clink.

He didn’t ask why. He didn’t tell her she should stay. He just exhaled through his nose once, turned, and reached for the cocoa pot sitting warm on the back burner where it had been since before she came in. He filled a mug without being asked and without looking at her to check whether she wanted it.

While the pot poured, Maggie tipped her head back and looked up, forgetting for a second everything she’d come in to feel.

Greenery filled the entire upper half of the room. She’d seen it before of course, but she had never once seen it like this; truly alive and glowing beneath the morning sunlight through the windows - eucalyptus, spruce and moss, threaded through with long ropes of something silvered, dried orange rounds turning slow on invisible threads of cedar and bay.

In this light, the whole thing stopped being mere decoration. It looked instead like the inside of an actually forest that had wandered in out of the cold and settled itself along the building rafters to wait out the winter.

While the man who had made it stood beneath his magnificent winter garden filling a mug of cocoa as though it were nothing, as though he hadn’t grown a whole living thing over his own head because duty wouldn’t let him grow one in the ground.

“Always better in the mornings I think,” Will stated. He’d caught her looking. He wasn’t smiling exactly, but the lines at the corner of his eye had softened. “Likes to show off before the crowd gets here. Doesn’t need an audience.”

“A bit like its maker,” Maggie smiled. “It really is incredible, Will. What exactly is it all made of?”

“Mostly stubbornness.” He slid the mug across the counter to her, turned so the handle came to her hand, and then he stepped back and leaned against the shelf behind him, crossed his arms loose over his chest and looked at her.

It was the same look she’d noticed that first day at the committee table, and had noticed a hundred times since without ever quite naming it - the attention he paid, level and unhurried, that let a person feel both seen straight through and given all the space in the world to be whatever they were being.

He didn’t fill the quiet. He didn’t reach for the joke that was surely sitting somewhere behind the look. He just leaned there under his incredible living forest with his sleeves shoved up, and watched her wrap both hands around the mug and waited, and Maggie knew that the waiting wasn’t a demand.

It was an offer she could take or leave.

The cocoa was thick and dark and warm through the ceramic, and when she drank there was that catch of salt under the sweetness she’d stopped pretending she didn’t recognize.

The bell over the door was silent. No one came in. The bulbs ticked faintly in their strand and the living eucalyptus threw its clean cold-green smell down over the counter, mixing with the cinnamon and the roast. While the two of them sat inside a quiet that had weight to it, that pressed at the edges of the morning like the snow pressed at the fogged glass.

“So your crisis still awaits in Boston I take it?”