Page 52 of The Christmas Stroll

Maggie followed his gaze. Slung across the entire vault of the ceiling, along the walls and lit from within, was the result of what had been carried off on last Sunday’s Nantucket island ferry, and since transformed into a miracle.

Green garlands ran the length of the room, cedar and eucalyptus roped together and swagged from the chandelier fittings down to the pillars; deep lush green and silver layered soft against each other and threaded all the way through them. While thousands of warm white bulbs burned low and gold beneath it, so the whole ceiling glowed like a forest that had caught fire without heat.

Dried orange rounds turned slow on invisible threads. Clusters of amaryllis stood tall and red down the center of every table; Hollywood-Dramatic indeed, and the swags on the marble mantels dripped pine and bay to the floor.

The room even smelled like Christmas - cedar and spruce, clean and cold and green, laid over the warm sugar of the food offerings coming out on silver trays, and under all of it the faint sweet ghost of orange.

It was, Maggie admitted smiling, an expanded version of how a certain Nantucket café looked first thing on a sunlit December morning.

“My daughter’s getting married in June,” continued the CEO. “I want this. Exactly this, well the summer version obviously. Who’s the artist?”

Maggie let the moment sit. She let it breathe, the way she’d recently learned to let a silence do the work, and she looked up at the installation with him. At the forest she had watched a man build over two sleepless days in a rented warehouse near the Seaport, cursing gently and never once asking for help, and she felt something warm and proprietary rise in her chest that had nothing to do with the invoice.

“He’s … impossible to get,” she said.

“Everyone’s gettable.” Hartwell’s eyes came back to her, sharp with the thrill of the chase. “Give me a number. I’ll get him.”

“You can’t. He runs a café.”

“A café.” He said it the way he might have said a monastery, wrinkling his nose. “Where?“

“On an island.” Maggie turned the empty glass in her fingers and enjoyed, thoroughly, every second of it. “Thirty miles out to sea. This is a one-time deal I’m afraid, sir. He’s not for sale.”

Hartwell blinked at that and laughed again, delighted and thwarted, a man not used to being told no, and rather enjoying it. “You’re really not going to tell me?”

“I’m really not.”

“He’s got a hell of an agent, whoever he is.”

“He’s got no agent at all.”

Maggie was still smiling when a shoulder came up beside her and a voice she’d have known in a blackout, low and warm and doing a very poor job of hiding itself said:

“Actually, I have excellent representation ...”

Chapter 41

Will stood at her elbow in a tuxedo that fit him like it had been made to, which Maggie was fairly sure it hadn’t, the collar open one button at the throat, as though he’d already begun the negotiation of getting out of it.

He had a champagne flute in each hand, his face caught the gold lights from the ceiling, and he was looking not at the departing CEO but overhead, at his own winter garden strung magnificently across a Boston ballroom.

There was a catch of something in his face he wasn’t bothering to hide - pride, plain and unguarded, the look of an artist seeing something he’d carried around inside himself forever finally visualized.

Will handed Maggie one of the flutes without looking, the handle turned to her fingers, and she took it, and thought of another unasked for cocoa slid across a counter in the early hours of the morning.

They drifted out of the current together, the way they’d learned to move through the Nantucket Stroll crowds without discussing who went which way, and found a pocket of quiet at the edge of the dance floor where a pillar wrapped in cedar threw a little shade from the light.

The band had started up now, something slow and brushed and old, and the noise of five hundred people softened into a warm blur behind them.

Maggie leaned her shoulder against the greenery-wound pillar and breathed in the eucalyptus off it, cool and green and clean, and thought that no matter where she went for the rest of her life, that smell was going to mean a café at dawn and a man in the morning sunlight filling a mug she hadn’t asked for.

“I think you’ve made an enemy for life now,” Will joked. “The guy wanted a Lambo and you offered him a station wagon.” He watched Hartwell across the room, already telling the story to someone in emerald velvet, gesturing up at the ceiling with his glass.

Maggie shrugged. “He’ll dine out on it for a month. It’s a better story, and everyone here would rather have a story than a solution.”

“I know all about stories. I run a cafe, remember?”

“You keep saying that.” Maggie turned her flute by the stem, the bubbles climbing gold in the glittering light. “You said it to three thousand people on Saturday. You said it to me at your own counter with a whole forest hanging over your head.” She looked up at the canopy, at the ropes of cedar and the turning orange rounds and the ten thousand warm bulbs burning through the green. “I said I remembered that all you ever wanted was to be out in nature. Gardens. That you had a whole plan.” She brought her eyes back down to him. “And you went quiet.”