Chapter 28 - Maren
Maren
“Can’t believe I didn’t know this place was here.” Ethan craned his neck in the driver’s seat to take in the view of the nondescript building as we pulled up.
“Is that where all the kids live?” Sadie pointed, her eyes shining with curiosity.
I smiled and slid the door open. “Come on. I’ll show you.”
The rental van pulled up in front of the orphanage, snowflakes swirling in the late-afternoon light like flecks of glitter caught on the wind.
My anticipation was a mix of excitement and nerves.
The kids tumbled out first, their scarves and mittens slightly damp, cheeks rosy from the cold.
I followed, Adrian holding one hand, Miles another, and Ethan walking just a step behind me.
Inside, the orphanage was buzzing with energy in the dining area. Children darted from corner to corner, some in awe of the decorations, others drawn immediately to the giant Christmas tree that Lumen Events had donated.
“Looks good,” Adrian said with an approving nod.
I nudged him in the ribs. “Yeah, thanks again for making me fill out all those forms to get it.”
“Procedure, ma’am. What can I tell ya?”
Twinkling lights wrapped every banister, and garlands of red and gold ribbon adorned the walls. Mouthwatering smells from the kitchen made my stomach growl.
A familiar squeal cut through the room, and I turned just in time to receive Liv’s arms as she engulfed me in a bone-crushing hug.
“Look at this place,” she said into my shoulder. “Did you see the tree this year?” She pulled back, eyes immediately darting over my shoulder.
And there it was.
That slow sweep of interest that made heat creep up my neck. Because she saw them. All three of them.
Ethan moved first, hand outstretched. “Ethan, hi. I heard what you said before and just wanted to say it’s an honor for Lumen Events to partner with you and Maren. The tree, the gifts… You can count on our ongoing support.”
Liv’s gaze flicked back to me, and the look she gave me was half wry smile, half holy hell. “Uh, thanks… Ethan. You have no idea how much that means.”
I saw Adrian and Miles approaching and for some reason, was gripped with panic. I grabbed Liv’s hand. “Come meet the kids.”
“Maren.” Her voice dropped into that long-suffering note she used whenever I dodged her. “Don’t you dare—”
But it was too late.
“This is Will, Emma, and Sadie,” I said, and the kids shifted awkwardly as they stood in a line, not sure what to do with the sudden attention from a stranger.
Liv crouched to Sadie’s height. “You ready to be an elf today?”
Sadie nodded, then shuffled closer and whispered something in her ear. Liv widened her eyes dramatically. “Snacks first? I mean… I guess that makes you a union elf. Go on, then. Table’s that way.”
Sadie bolted. Will and Emma followed, eager to evaluate the spread like tiny food critics. Within seconds they had made three new friends and were reorganizing the cookie plates with ruthless efficiency.
Liv stood, dusted her jeans, and shot me a narrow look. “Convenient diversion.”
“Those cookies weren’t going to eat themselves.”
The men had drifted over to the tree, keeping an unofficial perimeter around me. Something none of them admitted to doing but all of them did anyway. Liv tracked their posture, their attention. When her eyes returned to me, I knew I had no escape left.
“Okay. Spill.”
I’d only given her half the story back when I’d surfed her and Jonathan’s couch. Too nervous to tell her the whole truth. Afraid she’d think differently of me, or whatever. The words got stuck in my throat.
“Maren.”
A strong arm snaked around my waist, and Miles’ scent enveloped the space we were in. “You guys have done an awesome job here. Thanks for inviting us.”
I cursed his easy physical affection at the worst possible time, my cheeks flushing hot. I couldn’t look at Liv, not with the way she kept smiling at me.
“The more the merrier,” Liv said with an unusually light tone. “I’m Liv. The best friend.”
Miles’ dimples worked overtime and I watched her melt under their power. “Pleased to meet you, best friend. I’m Miles.”
Then she giggled. She giggled.
I wanted the earth to swallow me up. Orphans be damned. There were bigger things at play here.
And did I honestly think I could bring them all here without her catching on? The one person who knew me better than anyone and had “attention to detail” listed first under the competencies section of her resume?
Maybe I wanted her to catch on. That way, I wouldn’t have to tell her myself.
But when I looked at her, it wasn’t judgment or disdain in her eyes. Just wild curiosity and… Was she impressed with me right now?
“Liv, Maren…” The steward of the orphanage came over and thankfully put me out of my misery. For a while, anyway. “Can I talk to you real quick?”
She pulled us aside and shared a problem that would single-handedly ruin the day.
But as she was talking, brainstorming ways around it, I glanced at Adrian across the room.
He was on his knees, carefully taking instruction about a complicated clapping game from some of the kids.
He kept messing up—whether by accident or deliberately to get them laughing—and it had them in stitches.
“Come with me.” I’d showed up out of nowhere and didn’t bother hiding the urgency in my voice, so I forgave the look of alarm.
Adrian got to his feet and spared a furtive look around. “Here? With all the kids around?”
“Ew, no.” I slapped his arm. “Get your mind out of the gutter and just… come.”
We passed the steward on our way to the coat room, and she shot me a dubious look. But I assured her with a nod. Luckily for us, we had the perfect person in attendance to save the day.
“Okay, Maren, my mind is firmly out of the gutter,” Adrian said with a light laugh. “But I gotta say, you pushing me into the coat room like this—”
“Put this on.” I shoved a package against his chest. It was soft, wrapped in brown paper, and a torn corner revealed a sliver of red velvet.
His eyebrow quirked up when he noticed it. “Role play. I like it.”
“Adrian, stop.” I couldn’t help feeling a jolt of excitement at his suggestion. That was definitely an area we’d have to explore. But not now. “Get the suit on, and meet me by the tree in two minutes.”
I swept out of the coat room, closing the door on Adrian’s stunned but mildly entertained expression. The steward caught my eye, and I gave her a thumbs up.
“Don’t think you’re off the hook,” Liv whispered when I met her at the tree. “I want to know everything.”
I gave her a cheeky smile, and made it my business to focus exclusively on arranging the piles of gifts to be handed out. A few seconds later, Ethan showed up, out of breath and rosy cheeked.
“Found this in the rental.” He waved a burlap sack at me. And when I just stood there, confused, he shook it harder. “Props. You honestly think Adrian’s gonna do this without the appropriate flair?”
He filled the bag with gifts and flashed a winning grin before taking it back to the coat room for Adrian.
My face was beginning to hurt from smiling.
Just all the good stuff. That’s what it was.
The connection between them, their connection with me…
And then being able to have days like this where—
“Definitely, positively, nowhere near off the hook.” The look on my face must’ve set her off, but there was no way of hiding it.
Besides, I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
Adrian made his entrance by nearly tripping over the tree skirt.
The suit was too big in the shoulders and too small in the legs, which somehow made it perfect.
The kids shrieked the moment they spotted him waddling toward the chair we’d set up beside the tree.
He tossed the burlap sack to Ethan, who caught it like this was a professional handoff and not a Christmas fever dream.
“Merry… hang on.” Adrian squinted down at the tag of the first gift. “Do I need reading glasses for this gig? Is Santa allowed to borrow someone’s readers?”
A handful of kids dissolved into giggles. One boy marched up with an exaggerated sigh and plucked the tag from his fingers.
“You need help, Santa?”
“Thank you, my assistant.” Adrian gave a solemn nod, which only made the velvet hat slip down over his eyes. He shoved it back up and reached for another present. “Next time, I’m demanding cookies before labor. Learn from my mistakes, folks.”
Even the staff laughed at that. Ethan fed him gifts from the sack with the efficiency of someone who’d accidentally become Santa’s stage manager.
Miles hovered near the back, offering dramatic gasps and commentary like he’d been hired to hype the crowd.
It worked. The whole room pulsed with that fizzy kind of joy that came from kids believing absolutely everything they saw.
Liv drifted to my side, her gaze glued to the scene. She didn’t comment at first. She didn’t need to. I could feel the weight of her thoughts pressing into the space between us.
When she finally spoke, her voice was deceptively casual. “Do you care about them?”
My head whipped toward her. “What? What do you mean?”
She angled one brow, the kind of expression that used to get answers out of me in college when I tried to pretend I wasn’t into someone. She didn’t clarify. She just held my stare until I felt heat crawl up the back of my neck.
My attention slid back to the tree. Adrian lifted a stuffed reindeer over his head like it was a sacred relic. Ethan looked like he was pretending not to smile. Miles made a quiet trumpet noise with his hands.
Liv stepped closer. “Maren.”
“I… We haven’t…” My tongue knotted. There was no good script for this. There wasn’t even a bad one. “I don’t know what to call it.”
She hummed, like she’d been expecting that. “They care about you. I can tell.”
I stared at her, stunned. Her words cleaved through every flimsy excuse I’d been circling for weeks. I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t even pretend she was wrong.
For weeks I’d known things had gone beyond being just physical with them. It was the reason Ethan’s harsh reaction cut so deep the night Emma ran off. Why I quit. And it was why, when he showed up at Liv and Jonathan’s apartment, I went back.
She linked her arm through mine, guiding us a little closer to the tree where the kids were now cheering because Adrian had just granted someone “official elf status” with a plastic candy cane scepter.
Warmth swelled through me at the sight. The kind that scraped an old ache I hadn’t acknowledged.
The kind that made breathing feel like walking a tightrope.
“I’m crazy,” I murmured, barely trusting myself to say it aloud. “I’ve lost the plot and it’s derailing my life. Tell me I’m crazy.”
Liv patted my arm like she was humoring a child who’d declared she wanted to live on the moon. “Of course you’re crazy. But that’s what happens when we fall in love.”
My pulse stumbled, heart lurching so hard it cracked my chest wide open with a kind of clarity I hadn’t felt.
In some weird way, my brain’s way of dealing with it was to send me into a nervous, shaky laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
Liv turned to me fully, Santa shenanigans forgotten, and took hold of both my arms as if to shake some sense into me.
“For years I’ve watched you go on and on about this life plan, sacrificing so much of yourself as long as the right boxes got ticked.
But Maren, as your best friend, I need to tell you… Fuck that plan.”
I blinked at her. “What?”
“Fuck it,” she repeated under her breath.
“You’re glowing. You’re… I don’t know, looser.
More free with yourself. And even though you were a mopey bastard while crashing on my couch, it was clear that you’d changed.
For the better. Ask Jonathan if you don’t believe me.
He’s a dimwit on the best of days, but even he noticed.
You’re happy. Don’t let something you wrote in a diary a hundred years ago steal that from you. ”
But before I could react, the steward called out to gather the room, her voice cutting through the hum of laughter. Kids scurried toward the front, clutching their gifts, and the energy shifted into something expectant as everyone moved to listen.
The steward delivered her thanks, then rallied everyone into a carol that shook the garlands on the walls.
After that, the afternoon slipped into a warm blur of kids unwrapping gifts, games erupting on the floor, and the men scattered across the room in their own little pockets of chaos-in-disguise joy.
By dusk, coats were tugged on again and half the mittens had gone missing. We shepherded everyone toward the exit, and when the doors opened, the cold swept in all at once. Snow drifted down in wide flakes, catching in the kids’ hair as we stepped out into the early evening.
“Everybody in.” I stood by the van and watched the kids march inside one at a time.
Ethan started up the engine and met my eyes in the rearview mirror. “Ready to go home?”
There was that word again. Home. It fluttered into my heart like a wayward snowflake, and settled there, magically warm as it melted and took hold.
“Ready,” I replied, smiling at him.
“Mouse! It’s a mouse!” The serenity was pierced by Emma’s shrill voice. She jumped with her feet up on her seat, and Will yanked his legs up too.
Sadie, surprisingly composed, held up her hand and revealed the source of the commotion—a tiny, twitching mouse tucked into her mittened grip.
The reaction was instantaneous. Screams, yelps, and curses collided into one another.
In the frenzy, Sadie dropped the mouse, and that only amplified the hysteria.
“Oh, my God, out, out. Everyone out.” I corralled them through a panicked scramble for the door.
Within seconds, everyone tumbled out of the van and onto the icy sidewalk, snow sticking to jackets and hair as pandemonium reigned. At that moment, Liv was just leaving the orphanage and stepped onto the sidewalk.
“Is everything okay? What happened?”
A tiny squeak answered for me. The mouse darted out of the van, and skittered across the street, disappearing into the snowy blur.
Ethan sighed heavily, massaging his temples. “I never thought I’d have to say this, but no wild animals in the car, okay?”
“But he was my friend.” Sadie looked up at us, her big eyes misted over, bottom lip trembling.