The Eight Heartbreaks of Hanukkah

Chapter One

The last thing Evelyn Schwartz could remember was the carolers.

Caroler number eighteen was missing.

Evelyn checked her production notes just to be certain.

Yes, she was right. There were supposed to be thirty-six chorus members on call for the opening act dress rehearsal of A Christmas Carol.

It was a market scene, with sixteen of her cast onstage, selling wares behind stalls and frolicking with children building snowmen.

The rest of the chorus would enter at various points throughout the swelling music.

Caroler eighteen was supposed to be minding the stall farthest stage left, wrapping a gift for caroler sixteen in elegant Christmas paper before handing it off in a spin.

After which, caroler eighteen was supposed to be pelted in the back by an incoming snowball.

Instead, without the chorus member there to complete the blocking, the gift dropped to the ground and the snowball landed directly in the face of an electrician working to get a Victorian streetlamp to stop blinking.

Evelyn had seen enough. Pulling her lavalier microphone out of her ear, she waved her arms above her head, bringing her cast to a standstill.

“Enough!” she said, turning to seek out Demi Meyers, her supervising producer and second-in-command on set.

Next thing Evelyn knew, she was lying flat on her back.

The revelers, like the stage crew and the cameras, had disappeared, and Evelyn was staring up into some sort of tunnel, a bright light swirling at the end. She considered the very real possibility she was dead, when a voice—surprisingly soothing in its depth and resonance—called her by name.

“Evelyn,” the voice repeated. “Can you hear me?”

“God?” Evelyn asked.

The voice cleared its throat. “Not quite.”

The light pulled back. Evelyn blinked. “Where am I, then?”

“Medical bay.”

“M-medical . . .” she stammered.

No, this wasn’t right. She wasn’t supposed to be lying down on some cot in Medical. She was supposed to be on Stage 19, running through the opening act with all thirty-six of her Victorian-era revelers.

She sat up just long enough to see a medical poster of half-dissected body parts on the wall, before her eyes focused on the outline of a man—with impossibly broad shoulders—hunched over a drawer and searching for something.

Just then, a sharp pain pierced behind her left eye.

She groaned and, feeling the ache spread across her temples, shut her eyes tight.

“Whoa.” The voice returned to her side and laid one hand on her shoulder. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“You don’t seem fine.”

“It’s a headache,” she said, before adding for clarification, “A migraine.”

He flicked off the lights.

“How’s that for the time being?” he asked.

She sighed deeply. “Thank you.”

She was always getting headaches. Migraines, technically.

If their usual studio physician, Dr. Vikram Brar were here, he would understand that.

But this man wasn’t Vikram. For one, Vikram was rather slight, standing no more than five foot six on a good day.

This man had more definition in his shoulders than a dictionary.

He also smelled . . . weirdly familiar. Like cloves and sea salt, something spicy and earthy, something she would want to press her face into and inhale, if she wasn’t smack-dab in the middle of a migraine.

“Where’s Vikram?” she asked.

“Dr. Brar had a last-minute emergency,” the voice explained. “Nobody told you?”

“I guess not.”

Evelyn was annoyed. She had worked with Vikram for years.

As such, they had an understanding. He helped her mediate the needs of the talent, and their health, alongside the often outrageous demands of her bosses on the twenty-seventh floor.

Considering Evelyn was executive producing one of the most expensive live events that CBS7-T studios had ever produced, where anything from sprained ankles to sore throats could sink them, it would have been nice if she had been made aware of the sudden employee change from HR.

Still, she tried to look on the bright side.

If this new doctor had been hired by the studio, he must have experience.

He wasn’t just some rando off the street, but likely a person who had worked in television medicine before.

He would know better than to stand in the way of her success.

He would be fair. Rational. But first, he needed to back up.

“Could you maybe . . . just step away from me for a moment?” Evelyn asked, sweetly.

“Excuse me?”

“It’s just . . . you smell.”

A scoff escaped his lips.

“Not bad,” she said, attempting to clarify. “You don’t smell bad, at all, actually. I just . . . mean, you have a smell.”

It was weirdly unsettling. Not just the scent—smoky, like a campfire—but his voice.

Low and gravelly, even when he was trying to whisper.

And again, it felt so oddly familiar. She tried to place it, ran through her mental database of doctors who had contracts still on file with CBS7-T studios, when she heard him sit down on a chair and swivel a safe distance away.

“Thank you,” she repeated.

“No problem,” he said. “Is the dark helping?”

“Yes,” she said. “But I have medicine in my bag in my office.”

“Medicine?”

“For the migraines,” she said, attempting to explain. “That’s why I’m here, right? They’re usually under control, but I guess the music, the noise . . .”

The stress. She didn’t say that part aloud, but she was thinking it.

It was most definitely a headache. The aura in her eyes that made it hard to focus.

The feeling of someone taking two steel ice picks and shoving them directly into her temples, bringing them together in one loud clank behind her occipital lobe.

She supposed that a life of chronic pain would sink most people, but for Evelyn, it was her normal.

Evelyn lived with chronic migraines. Not common enough for her insurance to cover Botox, of course .

. . but frequent enough that she took a daily prescription pill to reduce their occurrence, and used a combination of rescue drugs to manage them when the daily medicine wasn’t enough to combat the pain.

The issue was, of course, that she never seemed to have enough medicine.

Her frustration grew just thinking about it. She should have taken one of her limited migraine prescription drugs that morning, at the first sign of twitching pain in the top of her eye. Unfortunately, her insurance only allowed nine pills’ worth of Maxalt each month.

It was the only drug that worked reliably for her headaches, stopping them outright. Considering her migraines could span days, and the drug needed to be taken every twelve hours, she often ran out. And so, every month of her life, she rationed her precious medicine.

This month, she had to be particularly austere. She was worried about having a migraine on Christmas Eve, when the live-action musical would officially be broadcast on national television, and being too doubled over in pain to work.

That reality would be nothing short of a disaster.

The version of A Christmas Carol Evelyn was producing wasn’t just a big-budget televised event.

It was Jared Sparks, one of the hottest rock stars turned film stars around, playing the role of Scrooge.

It was Wynn Manuel writing the original score, his first contract with CBS7-T studios, and it had to be perfect.

It had to be the best show in the history of live television .

. . because Evelyn Schwartz was executive producing it.

Her whole life had been leading up to this moment. All her dreams. All her hard work, the many hours of her life when she had chosen work over family or friendship. Damned if she was going to let a lifetime of chronic migraines stand in the way of all that.

“Do you remember what happened?” he asked.

“Of course I do,” she lied.

“So, you remember getting hit in the head with a piano.”

She didn’t remember that. “A piano?”

“Apparently,” the voice continued, “you were looking for a missing caroler, and didn’t see them bringing in the piano behind you. You ran right into it, I’m told. Passed out almost immediately after. José and Philip had to carry you back here.”

No wonder her head was killing her.

The rest came back in a flash. The winter wonderland, which was just beginning to come alive in front of her eyes. The revelers, and the musicians, gathered to practice the opening act on the main set. All that was left to do was bring in the piano.

With the sort of Rent-like production design, it needed to be hoisted up, though, as it would be living on the second-floor rafters.

The location was a contemporary take on the traditional Christmas village, so that when the lights drifted to dim and the music swelled, you would see the musicians playing their instruments through the glass windows of the Victorian houses.

She was grateful to her team for safeguarding her health. But now, as this fine doctor was reminding her, it was time to get back to work.

Evelyn attempted to sit up again, but a dizzy spell overtook her. She wobbled in place, her vision unfocused, the orange glow of the electric menorah on the desk feeling violently oppressive, until the source of the voice that had been keeping her company grabbed her by the waist.

“Whoa,” the voice said. “Where are you going?”

“Back to work,” she explained, even though she had to talk to him with her eyes buried in her hands.

“You don’t seem well enough to return to work right now.”

“I told you,” she snapped back. “It’s just a migraine. I have medicine in my office.”

“You haven’t been able to open your eyes since you were brought in here.”

“That is a bald-faced lie.”

“Either way, I can’t let you leave here until I’m able to examine you. You could have a concussion. Or worse. It’s my job as the chief physician to make sure you are safe.”

“And it’s my job,” Evelyn said, definitively, “as executive producer of the live-action musical A Christmas Carol, to be there for the first rehearsal onstage. I appreciate your concern, okay? But I have eight days to get everybody on the same page about this. I don’t have time for migraines.

I don’t have time for doctors with something to prove, either. ”

She didn’t feel bad for being clear about her needs. She had important things to do. Details to arrange and organize. Even with a pounding headache, the list was still scrolling through her brain:

1.See that all the musical instruments arrived and were situated on set.

2.Complete one entire run-through with the cast, getting every line and cue just right, so it would be perfect when Jared Sparks arrived.

3.Confirm camera angles with lighting and crew.

Then, there were all the smaller details within the larger ones to contend with:

4.Make sure the puppetry of the three ghosts worked right.

5.Find caroler eighteen.

It was her ability to hold all that information in her head at once, to obsess over these small what-ifs and could-go-wrongs, that made her so damn good at her job.

All those little details sat on her mind and played on repeat.

She cuddled them on her lap on the subway to and from work.

She ate dinner with them, placing them in the seat beside hers, while she scarfed down Chinese takeout.

Sometimes, she even fell asleep with her notes just beside her, her tablet still open, a charger strung across the bed, resting like a lover on the pillow next to her.

The voice swiveled over to his desk, pulling out something from a drawer. “Or,” he said, after a few quiet moments, “we could make this really simple and I can just call an ambulance.”

“An ambulance!”

She was aghast at the suggestion.

“If you won’t let me examine you,” he said, “I’m sure the emergency physicians at Mount Sinai would be more than happy to give you a full workup.”

He was playing hardball, and she didn’t like it. She didn’t like him. Good smells, and melodic voice, notwithstanding . . . he was putting her in an impossible situation.

Yes, her head was killing her. Granted, she probably did need some sort of proper workup, considering she had passed out.

But health checks were a luxury reserved for people with time.

And Evelyn didn’t have time for a concussion.

She couldn’t simply detour to the ER, in Manhattan, during Christmas holidays.

She just wanted this overzealous doctor to give her the old studio sign-off and let her get back to work.

If she dropped dead on set—like her own mentor, Marla Feinberg, had done, clutching her production notes while simultaneously croaking out one last order to her staff—it would be her personal honor.

Television was what she lived for. It was what she loved. There wasn’t a single place in the world where she was happier. And then that voice, that low and melodic baritone that was both strangely tempting and impossibly frustrating, said something wholly weird.

“Come on, cowboy . . .” the voice pleaded, softly. Gently. “Don’t fight me on this one.”

Cowboy.

It couldn’t be, could it?

Her heart sped up inside her chest. Her mouth gaped open.

She forgot all about the headache and forced herself to open her eyes.

Her vision cleared, and she found her line of sight drifting from the poster of an Achilles’ heel, split open and dissected on the wall across from her medical cot, to the man now sitting on a stool beside her.

A wisp of disbelief fell from her lips. He was older now.

The dark brown in his hair had begun going gray around the edges.

There were creases around his otherwise boyishly blue eyes.

But he still had that one adorable dimple that sat just right of center to an impossibly angular chin .

. . and she couldn’t make sense of it. Of him, sitting there beside her, after two damn years.

Until finally, she wondered if the new doctor was right.

Perhaps she had hit the piano harder than she thought.

Maybe seeing him again, after all this time, was some sort of concussion-induced delusion.

Because there, leaning over his knees, two pink lips aimed patiently in her direction, was her ex-husband.

And the worst part of all . . .

He looked good.