“I’m working on it.”
“Work on it with a stepladder.” She pointed at the row of arched windows along the east wall, where boxes of light strands sat stacked and waiting. “Warm white lights along every sill. Draped, not strung. I want them to look like they fell there by accident.”
“Lights don’t fall by accident.”
“That’s the art of it. The more effort it takes, the more effortless it should look.”
He picked up a strand, set the ladder, and started draping.
She went back to her centerpieces. They worked across the room from each other. The click of light clips on a window frame. The soft drop of a tablecloth settling over a round table. Her footsteps, his ladder scraping two feet down the wall, her pen scratching a line off a list. The sound of two people making a room ready.
Window by window, the east wall began to glow.
He climbed down from the third window and found her holding a silver stand, waiting for him.
“Table four. Near the window with the pier view. Centered exactly. If the candle’s off center and the stand’s off center, the whole table looks like an apology.”
He carried it over. Placed it. Stepped back, tilted his head, moved it a fraction of an inch.
“Perfect,” she said. “You’re a natural.”
“Five years of centering cleats on dock planks. Same principle.”
“The principle of caring about things most people never notice.”
He looked at her then. Not at the centerpiece. At her, with the pen behind her ear and a smear of ribbon glitter on her wrist.
“I notice things,” he said.
“I know you do.”
The room held very still for a moment, all that warm light waiting with them. Then she grabbed her pen and the moment folded itself neatly away, filed under later, and they went back to work.
Dana arrived with the last of the flowers and moved through the room like a woman storming a beach. Lou delivered the cake on a rolling cart with three separate warnings about napkin proximity and one threat involving a piping bag. The ballroom filled, piece by piece, with the work of people who’d chosen to be there.
At six o’clock, only the tree was left.
“Help me light it,” Margot said.
She knelt at the outlet. He reached behind the lower branches and found the plug, and their hands met over the cord, warm and deliberate, and neither of them pulled away.
“On three,” she said. “One. Two.”
They plugged it in together.
The tree blazed to life, and the room caught it and gave it back. Green and gold leaping into every window, every silver stand, every glass on every table, the whole ballroom suddenly alive with the glow of something two people had built out of nothing in a single afternoon.
She stood up slowly. He stood beside her, close enough that the warmth of her arm reached his.
She turned and straightened his collar, and her fingers brushed the side of his neck.
His pulse jumped under her touch. She caught it, and her gaze came up to his and held, steady and bright, the tree light moving in it.
Neither of them stepped back. Neither of them stepped forward. The whole evening balanced there on the head of a pin, shining.
“Thank you.” Her voice was not quite level. “For the lights. For the ladder. For coming back.”
“We did it together.”
