Page 51 of The Christmas Stroll

“A disaster actually,” Maggie heard herself say it too fast, but she kept going anyway, because momentum was safer than stillness. “I’ve got forty festive centerpieces that exist entirely in a spreadsheet, and five hundred people arriving at the Four Seasons next Thursday expecting the ballroom to look like Christmas cost somebody a small fortune. The first florist is out, and then the backup florist went out too. And her backup can only offer the dregs of what’s left the first week in December.” She lifted the mug and gestured with it, cocoa sloshing near the rim. “That’s basically the whole assignment. It has to look like money. Or preferably, like a magazine spread of money. Amaryllis and eucalyptus and swags on mantels. And I have exactly none of it, because every wholesaler and studio and freelance stem-wrangler between here and Providence has been booked solid since Halloween.”

“Sounds … fixable,” Will quipped.

“It’s really not though.” She set the mug down and pushed it an inch away and drew it back. “I’ve got a Cambridge Street wholesaler, but she’s just volume, not vision - she can get me flowers but she can’t get me drama. There’s a place in the South End that would do it and charge me my own kidney, yet still not deliver till Friday, and the client wants a walkthrough Tuesday afternoon, so it might as well be next year.” Maggie dragged a hand back through her hair. “Basically I need the place to look like a Hallmark Christmas movie, and I need it in four days, in a city where every flower with a stem on the east coast has already been spoken for.” She let out a breath that was more of a groan. “I need a miracle, basically.”

Will, who had let her run the whole length of it with his arms folded and his head tipped; watching her the way he watched a committee meeting he knew just the right thing to say into, uncrossed his arms.

He didn’t answer straightaway. He pushed off the shelf and came a step down the bar toward her, then lifted his chin at the fogged windows and the street beyond them. There was a light coming up behind his eyes she’d learned to recognize as the intuitive thing arriving before he’d finished putting words to it.

“Look around,” he said and Maggie glanced at him, mystified.

He nodded back toward the street. “Whole island’s dressed for Christmas, Sullivan. Overdressed. Every lamppost on Main’s got a balsam wreath your mother wired herself. There’s garland strung end to end down every storefront on Willow, there’s the lantern star, forty window boxes of cut greens, a warehouse behind the wharf full of what the committee didn’t use. And all of it - every wreath, every yard of garland, every strand of lights is about to come down.” He shrugged. “A whole town’s worth of expensive-looking Christmas, and half of it isn’t needed now that Stroll weekend’s over.”

Heart pounding, Maggie looked back at him, realization gradually dawning. He was right.

Will winked. “Clearly you just need a little imagination …”

Imagination … Her eyes again strayed up to the ceiling.

Maggie found herself looking - truly looking - at it in the sunlight - the moss, the spruce, the long silvered ropes, the dried orange rounds turning slow on their threads, the eucalyptus layered soft against bay and cedar, the whole living weight of it slung under the beams.

At the scale of it. At the way it took a simple, ordinary room and turned it into somewhere you didn’t want to leave. At the texture of it, the layering, the depth, moss against dried citrus against pine, the confidence of a person who understood that nature wasn’t decoration, it was artistry.

Will gently laid a hand on hers, bringing her attention back to him. “And maybe a helper.”

Maggie heard the ease in it, the throwaway lightness but heard too what was underneath. Her eyes moved across his face, slower this time, reading it the way she read a floor plan, then back up again, seeing how it hung and how it draped and the tricks of it, the way the ceiling beams carried the whole thing so the room felt full.

Then looked again back at Will. “And maybe a helper,” she repeated, mouth curving.

Perhaps Maggie had indeed found her Christmas miracle.

Chapter 40

The following Thursday evening, the Four Seasons ballroom belonged to Maggie the way Main Street had belonged to the Stroll.

She moved through the space in a red silk dress that caught the light as she read the room the way she’d read every room since she was old enough to hold a clipboard.

Five hundred guests. Black tie. The low expensive hum of people who did not have to raise their voices to be heard.

She fixed an issue even before she’d finished registering that it was wrong. A bow over the far mantel had shifted an inch on its hook, so that one loop hung a hair lower than its twin, a droop that not one guest in five hundred would ever catch, and that Maggie could no more have walked past than she could have walked past the listing centerpiece in the previous one.

She crossed to it without seeming to cross to it, laid her fingers to the wire behind it and lifted the loop back to true against the marble, tucking it fast.

It took three seconds. A waiter passed behind her with a tray of champagne and never slowed. She turned back to the room, but the room had not even noticed she’d left it.

She moved on, and a woman in emerald velvet stopped her to say the room was the most beautiful thing she’d seen all season, while a man with a mayor’s handshake told her his wife had already photographed the interior four times.

Maggie thanked them both with the smile she kept for exactly this, the warm practiced one that gave nothing away and made everyone feel they’d been given everything.

She was halfway to the band when the CEO found her.

She knew him by the way the crowd bent toward him without appearing to move. He was tall and silvered and eternally pleased with himself, a man who paid for things and was accustomed to the results being far beyond value for money. He put a hand out to stop her with the ease of someone who had never once wondered whether he was allowed to.

“You,” he said. “You did all this.”

“I coordinated it, Mr. Hartwell. A great many hands - ”

“No.” He turned, taking in the room, and his face had the frank astonishment of a man who did not astonish easily and was enjoying the novelty. “I’ve done holiday parties every year in this city for twenty years. I’ve had the best. I’ve paid for the best. I have never …” he lifted his glass and looked all around, “… seen anything like this. It’s like a Hallmark movie. With a Hollywood budget.” He laughed at his own line and meant it.