22. Derek
DEREK
Six ice blocks sat in a loose row across the square, each one taller than the contestants standing next to them.
Sunlight caught the frozen cores and made the whole lineup look more like sculpture than raw material.
Chainsaws idled at half a dozen elbows, that low mechanical growl bouncing off the storefronts until the whole street sounded like it was clearing its throat.
Fine ice dust hung in the air above every block, catching the light like somebody had shaken glitter over the entire square, and it coated my jacket within the first ten minutes of standing anywhere near the action.
"You're supposed to be judging, not hovering," Leah said, appearing at my elbow with two cups of cocoa and an expression that suggested she already knew exactly why I was standing where I was standing.
"I'm assessing safety hazards. It's part of the job."
"You've been assessing the same safety hazard for six minutes.
" She handed me a cup, nodding toward block number four, where a man named Roy Delgado stood squinting at a swan taking shape under his chainsaw with the fierce concentration of somebody who'd clearly watched one too many online tutorials the night before.
"That's just Roy. He does this every year.
He's never once finished with all his fingers intact, but he's never actually lost one either, so the town's decided that counts as an acceptable safety record. "
"That's not how safety records work."
"Tell that to the festival committee."
Roy's swan had a neck now, elegant in the way only frozen water carved by an amateur with a power tool could manage, curving up from a body still mostly square and unshaped.
He circled it twice, chainsaw held with the loose confidence of a man who had convinced himself skill and enthusiasm were the same thing, and started working on the head.
"This is either art or a workplace injury," I said, watching the angle of the blade against that thin, narrow neck. "I genuinely cannot tell."
"Can it be both? I feel like it's already both."
"It's usually both, with Roy."
The blade caught wrong, some combination of angle and momentum that even I could see coming a full second before it happened, and the swan's head tipped sideways, held on by nothing but a sliver of ice thinner than my finger.
A collective gasp rolled through the crowd gathered along the rope line, half of them already backing up, and Roy froze mid-cut with the particular stillness of a man recalculating his entire life's decisions in real time.
"Roy." I said it low, the same tone I used on rookies about to do something career-ending. "Step back from the swan."
"I've got it."
"You do not have it. The swan has decided things for itself now."
The head held, somehow, swaying gently with a soft creak audible even over the other chainsaws, and Roy backed away with both hands raised like he was surrendering to a piece of ice that outranked him.
"Structural integrity's compromised," I said, mostly to Leah, though half the crowd within earshot laughed anyway. "I'd recommend evacuating anyone standing within head trajectory."
"Head trajectory. You've officially turned an art contest into an incident report."
"Everything's an incident report if you look at it long enough."
Roy recovered enough nerve to approach again, slower this time, chainsaw held at a considerably more respectful distance, and managed to stabilize the wobbling head with a few careful passes that drew scattered applause from the crowd, the kind reserved for a man who had, against reasonable odds, avoided becoming a cautionary tale.
"He's not going to win," Leah said, sipping her cocoa, watching Roy step back to survey his lopsided masterpiece with real pride. "But I respect the commitment."
"Nobody's ever won with a swan that nearly decapitated itself mid-carving."
"There's a first time for everything."
Sarge materialized at my other elbow, phone still raised, clearly unwilling to miss a single frame of Roy's ongoing negotiation with physics.
"Twenty bucks says he loses an ear by the end of the hour."
"I'm not betting against a man's ice sculpture, Sarge."
"You're a coward, is what you are." He lowered the phone just long enough to grin at me. "Digby's already got a side pool going on whether Roy needs stitches this year. I put five dollars on no, out of loyalty."
"There's a betting pool for that too?"
"Everyone in this town bets on everything. You'd know that if you paid attention to anything besides fire code." He raised the phone again as Roy leaned back in for another pass. "You're in a good mood today."
"I'm always in a good mood."
"You have never once in your life been in a good mood before this winter, and we both know it." He said it without any real heat, already drifting off toward a better vantage point. "Enjoy it while it lasts, Chief."
I laughed, low and easy, the sound coming without any of the effort it used to cost me, and looked around the square while Leah moved off toward the next block to check on a nervous teenager attempting something that might have been a reindeer or might have been a very ambitious dog.
String lights crossed overhead between the lampposts, cocoa steam rose from a dozen cups scattered through the crowd, and somewhere past the rope line Sarge stood filming Roy's swan on his phone with the dedication of a man building a highlight reel for reasons I chose not to examine too closely.
I stood there a long moment just watching all of it, the chainsaws and the crowd, Leah crouched beside the teenager's block offering advice that made the kid laugh despite himself.
Something settled in my chest that took me a second to place, because I hadn't felt it in years.
Ease. Not the temporary kind that came after a good call went clean, the kind that always had an expiration date built into it.
Something steadier than that, something that didn't feel like it was waiting for the other half of the day to collapse.
I'd spent every holiday season since Boston bracing for it, counting down toward the twenty-third the way some men counted down toward a court date.
Every string of lights and every carol on the radio reminded me exactly what I'd be reliving in a few weeks, whether I wanted to or not.
I'd gotten good at getting through it. I had never once, in two years here, actually enjoyed a single day of it while it was happening.
This one I was enjoying. I stood in the middle of a town square watching a man nearly lose an ice swan's head to his own overconfidence, and I was actually, fully, without reservation, having a good day.
That realization sat strange in my chest. I wasn't used to it yet.
Leah wandered back over once the reindeer, or dog, had been declared structurally sound enough to leave unsupervised, cheeks pink from the cold, cocoa mostly gone, close enough that our shoulders brushed when she stopped beside me.
"You've got that look again."
"What look?"
"The one where you're thinking something you're not saying." She bumped my shoulder with hers, gentle, no push behind it. "You don't have to tell me. I just notice things."
I looked back out at the square, at Roy proudly gesturing at his swan for a cluster of admiring kids, at the string lights swaying faintly overhead, and decided, for reasons I didn't fully examine in the moment, that I wanted to say it anyway.
"I haven't had a good holiday season in a long time."
"That sentence has a lot of weight riding on the word haven't."
"It does." I watched my own breath fog out in front of me, easier to look at than her face while I said the rest of it. "The 23rd's always been hard for me. I don't really do the holidays after that."
She didn't ask why. She didn't ask who, or what happened, or any of the questions I'd braced myself for the second the words left my mouth, ones I'd have understood if she'd asked and dreaded answering just the same.
She just stood there beside me, quiet, letting the sentence exist in the cold air between us without trying to pin it down to something smaller and more explainable.
"Okay," she said eventually, soft.
"Okay?"
"I'm not going to make you explain it right now. Or ever, if that's not something you want to hand over." She said it simply, no performance in it, no careful therapy voice, just Leah being exactly as steady as she always was when something mattered. "I just wanted you to know I heard it."
Something in my chest loosened again, the way it kept doing around her lately.
For two years I'd kept the twenty-third locked away and let no one near it, and she'd just acknowledged it was there without trying to open it herself.
It should have felt like exposure. Instead it felt like somebody finally respecting that it was mine to open, not theirs to pry.
"Most people ask," I said. "Or they get this look, like they're trying to figure out what to say next."
"I'm sure they mean well."
"Some of them do. It doesn't make it easier."
"I'm not most people." She said it plainly, no arrogance in it, just fact. "And I'm not asking. I'm just standing here."
Roy's swan chose that exact moment to lose an ear, a thin curl of ice breaking free and clattering down onto the trampled snow, and the crowd around block four erupted into fresh laughter, Roy throwing both hands up in exasperated defeat while Sarge, still filming, laughed hard enough to nearly drop his phone.
"I should go deal with that," I said, not moving.
"You really should."
Neither of us moved.
The square kept going around us, chainsaws and laughter and the particular golden light that came right before a winter afternoon gave up entirely, and I stood there with my hands in my jacket pockets, letting the quiet between me and Leah stretch out longer than it probably needed to.
Saying it out loud, even that little bit, felt like putting weight on ice I wasn't sure would hold.
It hadn't cracked yet. I kept waiting for it to.
"For what it's worth," Leah said, "I like whatever this version of you is. The one who tells me things instead of just standing very seriously beside them."
"I'm still standing very seriously."
"You're standing very seriously while telling me things. It's an improvement."
She reached over without any particular ceremony to it, no big gesture, no meaningful pause beforehand, and laced her fingers through mine like it was the simplest thing in the world, like my hand had always belonged in hers and she was only now getting around to claiming it properly.
"Then I'll be around on the 23rd," she said, easy as anything, already looking back out at Roy's ruined swan like she hadn't just said something that rearranged every wall I'd spent two years building.
No questions behind it. No pressure riding underneath the words, no expectation that I explain myself further or promise anything back. Just four words, offered plain and certain, like showing up for me on the worst day of my year was the most obvious thing in the world to volunteer for.
I had to look away fast, out toward the square, toward Roy and his one-eared swan and the whole ridiculous, glittering chaos of the afternoon, because I was not entirely sure what my face was doing and I did not trust myself to let her see it.
"You don't have to do that," I said, once I'd found my voice again.
"I know I don't have to." Her fingers stayed laced through mine, warm despite the cold. "I want to. There's a difference."
I didn't have an answer for that. I stood there instead, holding her hand in the middle of a town square full of half-finished ice animals and chainsaw dust settling slow through the golden light, and let myself believe, just for a moment, that some doors were worth opening after all.