15. Leah
LEAH
Iunpacked exactly one box when I got home, a box of table linens I didn't need to unpack tonight and definitely didn't need to color code by hem length.
Then I gave up on unpacking altogether and spread every festival document I owned across the kitchen table instead.
A woman who's just been called unprofessional in a snowy field by a man she'd been about to kiss has two choices.
She can sit with that. Or she can build a floor plan so detailed it could survive a structural engineer's audit.
I chose the floor plan.
The cabin still looked like moving day had happened an hour ago instead of six weeks ago, boxes stacked three deep against the far wall under a sheet I kept meaning to take down, a lamp with no shade balanced on top of the tallest stack like a crooked little hat.
I hadn't hung a single picture. I told myself it was because I hadn't found the right nails, which was a lie so thin even Ember would have seen through it, and Ember's entire personality was chasing rabbits.
I was three vendor contracts deep and halfway through redrawing the New Year's dance floor layout for the fourth time when my phone rang with a number I recognized as the caroling group's self-appointed spokesperson, a soprano named Linda who took her role in that group roughly as seriously as Derek took a burning building.
"Leah, we need to talk about the break schedule."
"The break schedule."
"For the Candlelight Walk. We're doing forty minutes of continuous singing, and Brenda says her voice needs a rest every twenty, and I think that's fair, honestly, but Gary thinks we should power through, and I said that's not how vocal cords work, Gary, and now we're at an impasse."
"An impasse." I set my pen down, torn evenly between laughing and genuine concern for whatever was happening on the other end of that call. "Linda, it's caroling. Nobody's going to dock your pay if you take a water break."
"We'd like it formalized. In writing. A guaranteed five minutes every twenty, non-negotiable, or Brenda's threatening to walk, and if Brenda walks, we lose our only alto, and if we lose our alto, the whole arrangement falls apart, and then what are we even doing out there?"
"You want me to write a formal break schedule for a volunteer caroling group?"
"We're calling it a labor agreement."
I pressed two fingers against my temple and considered, seriously considered, whether this was the moment my career finally broke me for good. "Linda. I will write you a labor agreement. I will laminate it. I will personally deliver it to Brenda with a bottle of throat spray."
"You're the best, Leah."
"I'm something," I said, and hung up before Linda could unionize anything else, laughing hard enough by the end that I didn't hear the front door until Maddie was already three steps into the living room, a wine bottle in one hand and two glasses stacked in the other.
"Please tell me that laugh means something good happened, because I have been saving this bottle for a good reason and I refuse to drink it over a bad one."
"The caroling group is threatening a labor action."
"That is objectively a bad reason and I'm opening it anyway.
" Maddie dropped onto the couch, kicked her boots off, and curled her legs beneath her with the ease of someone who had been doing exactly this in exactly this spot since college, back when the couch had been a dorm futon and the wine had been considerably worse.
"Come sit. Bring the sad little linens box.
We can color code it together while you tell me why you actually sound like that. "
"Like what?"
"Like a woman who's about to pretend nothing's wrong for the next forty minutes before finally caving and telling me everything anyway. I've known you ten years, Leah. I can skip the forty minutes if you let me."
I abandoned the dance floor layout, poured myself a glass I didn't really want, and told her.
I didn't tell her all of it at first. I told her about the training grounds, the thicket, the way Derek had leaned in and then hadn't, the word unprofessional landing in my chest like something dropped from a height.
Maddie listened without interrupting, which for Maddie was its own kind of alarming, and when I finished she didn't say anything for a second, just turned her glass slowly by the stem.
"Do you want to know what Josh said to me when he proposed?"
"You've told me this story forty times."
"Not the whole thing. You've heard the version with the ring in it.
" She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, and something in her face went soft and private in a way I rarely saw, even after ten years.
"We were at the ranger station, middle of a shift change, and he'd forgotten the ring at home because he'd been so nervous he left it on the bathroom counter.
So he just said it. No ring, no speech he'd been rehearsing for a month, just, I don't want to do any of this without you next to me, and I'd rather ask you badly right now than ask you perfectly later.
That was it. That was the whole proposal. "
"That's a good proposal."
"It's the best proposal I've ever heard, and I'm including every wedding you've ever staged for a client who paid you six figures to make it look effortless." She reached over and squeezed my hand. "You know what Trevor did."
"Trevor rented out an entire restaurant and hired a string quartet."
"Trevor performed a proposal, Leah. There's a difference between a man building a moment for you and a man building a moment for the audience he imagined watching him do it.
" Maddie's voice had gone quieter, the teasing mostly drained out of it.
"You've spent your whole career making other people's happy endings. When do you get one?"
I didn't have an answer ready, which was rare enough that I noticed the silence stretching before I filled it.
"I don't know if I even know what mine looks like anymore," I said finally.
"I used to think I wanted the version Trevor gave me.
The show. The whole town watching. And then I found out the show was the only part that was real, and everything underneath it was hollow, and I've been terrified ever since that I wouldn't know the difference if it happened again. "
"And Derek?"
"Derek doesn't perform anything. That's what scares me about it.
He doesn't say things to be heard saying them.
When he tells me something, it costs him, and I can see it costing him, and I don't know what to do with a version of wanting someone that doesn't come with a stage attached.
" I turned my glass the same slow way Maddie had turned hers, watching the wine catch the lamplight.
"And then today he called kissing me unprofessional in front of his crew and walked off, and I don't know if that's a man who's scared or a man who's telling me exactly how this ends before it starts. "
"Sometimes those are the same man."
"That's not helpful, Maddie."
"I didn't say it was helpful. I said it was true." She bumped her shoulder against mine, gentler than the words. "For what it's worth, I've watched this town for six weeks, and I have never once seen Derek Walsh look at anything the way he looks at you. Not a fire. Not that dog. You."
"That's a low bar. He looks at most things like they've personally wronged him."
"He looks at you like you're the only warm room in a very cold winter.
" Maddie let that sit for a second, then softened it the way she always did right before she said something she meant completely.
"I just want you to have this, Leah. All of it.
Not the version you plan for other people. The real one."
"What if this town isn't it? What if I moved here and threw myself into somebody else's festival and somebody else's dog and somebody else's grief, and none of it was ever actually mine to keep?"
"What if it is?" Maddie asked, quiet enough that I heard exactly how much she meant it. "You don't have to know the answer tonight. You just have to stop assuming it's no before anyone's actually told you that."
I was reaching for the wine bottle to refill both our glasses when the knock came, three careful raps against the door, the kind of knock that had clearly been rehearsed on the walk over and still came out uncertain.
Maddie's eyebrows shot up so fast I nearly laughed despite myself.
"I'm not expecting anyone," I said, already standing, already certain who it was before I crossed the room, some old instinct in my chest recognizing the shape of that knock the way I'd have recognized my own heartbeat.
I opened the door, and Derek stood on the other side of it with his hands shoved deep in his jacket pockets, shoulders drawn up against the cold, snow catching in his hair, looking like a man who'd walked several blocks rehearsing something and lost most of it somewhere along the way.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi."
"I'm not good at this." He said it fast, like he needed to get it out before he lost his nerve entirely, his eyes fixed somewhere just past my shoulder rather than on my face.
"Any of it. Showing up unannounced. Apologizing.
Whatever this is supposed to be. I've had two years of practice at not doing it, and I'm bad at it, and I know I'm bad at it, and I came anyway because staying home felt worse. "
"Okay."
"What I said today. In the field." He pulled one hand out of his pocket, ran it through his hair, put it right back like it didn't know what else to do with itself.
"It wasn't about you. I need you to hear that part clearly, because I said it badly the first time and I think you heard something I didn't mean. It wasn't about you."
Something in my chest loosened, just slightly, the way a fist unclenches one finger at a time instead of all at once.
I didn't forgive him, standing there in the doorway with the cold pouring in around us both.
It wasn't that simple, and some stubborn, guarded part of me wasn't ready to let it be.
But the loosening was real, and I let myself feel it instead of arguing it away.
"Then what was it about?"
"I don't have the rest of it yet. I wish I did.
I wish I could stand here and hand you the whole explanation, tied up neat, but I can't, not tonight.
" He looked at me then, actually looked, and whatever he found in my face seemed to cost him something to hold steady under.
"I just needed you to know the part I do know.
It wasn't about you. It was never about you. "
"Okay." I studied him for a long moment, the snow melting slowly in his hair, the way he stood like a man bracing for a door to close in his face and staying anyway. "Then don't do that again."
"I'm not making promises I don't know how to keep."
"I'm not asking for promises. I'm asking you not to leave me standing in a field wondering what I did wrong when I didn't do anything.
" My voice came out steadier than I expected, steadier than I felt.
"If something's not about me, tell me that in the moment.
Don't hand it to me a full day later on my porch. "
"That's fair."
"I know it's fair. I'm the one who said it."
Something that wasn't quite a smile moved across his face, there and gone, the kind of small crack in the granite that I'd learned meant more from him than most men's whole speeches.
Behind me, I heard Maddie make a valiant, unconvincing effort to look like she wasn't listening to every word of this from the couch.
"I should let you get back to your night," Derek said, glancing past me toward the wine and the scattered contracts and Maddie's very poorly concealed interest. "I didn't mean to interrupt anything."
"You're not interrupting. You're a five-minute delay to a labor negotiation with a caroling group."
"That sounds like a story."
"It's a story you'd hate. Heavy on paperwork you'd probably approve of."
He almost smiled again, and this time it nearly made it all the way there before he caught it, and I found myself not wanting him to walk back down the porch steps into the cold quite yet, curious what else in my chest might come loose if I gave it room.
I opened the door wider.
I watched his shoulders drop, just slightly, the tension he'd been carrying since I opened the door easing out of him all at once. I understood what that meant before he stepped over the threshold. He'd come here braced for the door to shut in his face, and instead I'd opened it wider.