32. Leah
LEAH
The holiday market smelled like cinnamon and pine sap by nine in the morning, garland strung thick enough to lose a glove in.
I stood at the edge of it with a clipboard I barely needed anymore, watching a woman named Sydney Marsh cry happy tears into a cup of cider while her fiancé tried, badly, to keep his own composure.
"I still can't believe you remembered the fudge tent," Sydney said, wiping one eye with the back of her glove. "You remembered we got engaged near the cocoa stand and put the engagement party three stalls down from it on purpose."
"I remember everything about this square." I handed her a fresh napkin before she could ruin her makeup any further. "You proposed on that ice rink four weeks ago in front of half this town. I wasn't going to stage your party in a parking lot."
"You're going to make me cry again."
"You're already crying."
"That's not the same as crying more."
Her fiancé, a broad, quiet man named Paul who had clearly been coached extensively on when to speak and when not to, offered me a handshake that nearly took my whole arm off with it.
"This is perfect. All of it. The lights, the little heaters, the fact that our own families are standing around eating popcorn instead of sitting at some rented banquet hall. "
"That was the idea."
"You made it look effortless."
"It was extremely effortful. I just didn't let you see any of that part.
" I glanced past him at the string lights looping tree to tree, the same ones I'd argued with Derek over back in the first week of all this, and felt something settle warm in my chest that had nothing to do with the cider steam.
"That's the whole job. Nobody's supposed to see the scaffolding. "
Sydney hugged me before I could brace for it, quick and fierce and smelling like peppermint, and pulled back grinning. "I'm telling everyone I know. Every single person getting married in this county is hearing your name from me personally."
"Please. Tell everyone. I'll take the free advertising."
"You've earned it. Two events in, and you already run this town's whole calendar."
I didn't correct her math out loud, mostly because standing there with a second real client crying happy tears in front of me felt too good to complicate with a spreadsheet, and I let myself have the moment instead of immediately filing it away under work still to do.
Vendors packed up the party an hour later, garland and folding chairs and a cake stand that had somehow survived a county's worth of children running past it.
I walked away with my chest still doing that warm, unfamiliar thing it kept doing lately whenever something I'd built actually held.
Maddie found me at the edge of the square, already towing me by one sleeve toward Main Street before I'd finished saying goodbye to the last vendor.
"No time to gloat. We have a crisis."
"What kind of crisis?"
"The Christmas kind. It's the twenty-second, Leah. You have exactly zero gifts for Derek, and I refuse to let you give that man a card."
"I have a plan."
"You do not have a plan. I've known you ten years. I know that face."
She was, infuriatingly, correct, and she dragged me into Hutchins' General Store before I could argue.
The whole place was strung wall to wall in garland dense enough to brush the top of my head, candles glowing under fairy lights near the register, and Doris somewhere in back arguing cheerfully with a delivery driver about ornaments that had come in a size too small.
"Okay." Maddie planted both hands on her hips, surveying the shelves like a general assessing terrain. "What does Derek Walsh actually like?"
"Fire code. Silence. My company, specifically."
"Those are not purchasable."
"Unfortunately."
She picked up a candle from the nearest shelf, turned the label toward me with theatrical flourish, and read it aloud in a voice clearly meant to be persuasive. "Cedar and Firelight. Very masculine. Very fire chief."
"He'd think it was a joke gift."
"It could be a joke gift. Joke gifts have dignity."
We wandered deeper into the store, garland catching in my hair twice.
Maddie held up increasingly desperate options as we went: a mug shaped like a fire hydrant, a plaid throw blanket that smelled faintly of the storeroom, a keychain shaped like a tiny axe that she insisted was, quote, extremely on brand.
"What about this?" She grabbed a different candle off an endcap, holding it up with the solemnity of a woman presenting evidence in court. "It says Rustic Cabin. Smells like sawdust and regret."
"That's oddly specific."
"I panicked at a gift shop once and bought that exact candle for my cousin. This says I panicked at a gift shop, which is accurate, but maybe not the message you want to send your boyfriend."
"You're not selling it."
"I'm being honest with you. That's what friends do." She set it down and picked up another one immediately, sniffing it with real suspicion. "This one smells like a campfire had an argument with a candy cane."
"Put it back."
"I'm putting it back. I'm just narrating the experience for posterity."
We hit the mug aisle fifteen minutes later, Maddie increasingly frantic, me increasingly amused, and that was where I found it, wedged between a snowman-shaped creamer and a stack of mugs printed with reindeer that all looked faintly alarmed.
WORLD'S OKAYEST BOYFRIEND, it read, in a cheerful red font that had clearly been chosen by someone with a sense of humor and no budget for subtlety.
I picked it up and started laughing before I'd fully decided to.
"That's not a real gift," Maddie said, watching me turn it over in my hands.
"It's the real gift. I'm getting him the candle too, for the bit, but this is the actual present."
"You're going to give the fire chief of this entire town a mug that says he's okay at his job?"
"He's going to love it. He's exactly the kind of man who pretends not to have a sense of humor and then keeps something like this on his desk for two years out of pure spite."
"That's either the best gift idea you've had all season or a cry for help."
"Both things can be true."
Maddie bought the candle, insisting on covering it herself as her own contribution to what she called, without a trace of irony, the bit, and we walked out of the store twenty minutes later with a bag full of nonsense and my chest still aching pleasantly from laughing too hard at a fire hydrant mug we hadn't even bought.
She peeled off toward Pinewood Perk with a wave and a promise to hear every detail later, and I stood alone on the sidewalk a minute, garland still stuck in my hair from the store, holding a bag with a mug in it that I already knew was going to make him laugh despite himself, and felt the good mood settle into something steadier underneath the noise of it.
I sat in my car outside my own storefront for a long time after that, engine off, hands cold around my phone, working up the nerve to do the thing I'd already decided to do three separate times that morning and talked myself out of twice.
I called Diane before I could talk myself out of it a third time.
"Leah." She picked up on the second ring, brisk as ever, already halfway through some other conversation in the background before she'd fully turned her attention to me.
"Please tell me you're calling with good news.
I've got a board meeting in twenty minutes and I need something to walk in there feeling optimistic about. "
"I'm staying, Diane." I said it plain, no hedging in front of it, the way I'd rehearsed it in the shower that morning and then again in the car just now. "I hope the role finds someone great. It's just not going to be me."
She was quiet for a second, long enough that I heard the background noise on her end shift, a door closing somewhere, the particular hush of someone stepping out of a room to actually listen.
"You're sure?"
"It's not a maybe, Diane. It's a yes."
"It's a real title, Leah. Real salary. The market you used to say you'd take a bullet for."
"I know exactly what it is. I thought about it seriously, longer than you probably think I did.
" I looked out my windshield at Bennett Events and Weddings painted gold across my own glass, at the town square two blocks down still glowing faint with the morning's leftover magic, at a whole life I'd built here with my own hands instead of borrowed from somebody else's plan for me.
"I built something here that's actually mine.
I'm not walking away from it to prove I can survive somewhere colder. "
"This town isn't going anywhere. The opportunity might not wait forever."
"I know. I'm choosing anyway." My voice came out steadier than I expected it to, certainty settling into it the longer I talked. "This isn't me settling, Diane. This is me actually wanting something and not being scared of it for once."
Another pause, shorter this time, and when she spoke again some of the brisk edge had softened out of her voice entirely.
"For what it's worth, I'm a little jealous. I don't think I've ever once chosen something just because I wanted it." She said it quietly, almost like she hadn't meant to say it out loud. "Good for you, Leah. I mean that."
"Thank you for the offer. Genuinely. It meant something that you called me first."
"I made sure of that." A small, dry laugh. "I have to go pretend to be optimistic in a board meeting now. Take care of yourself out there in the snow."
"I will."
She hung up before I could say anything else, brisk to the very last second.
Somewhere in that call, without quite meaning to, I had stopped needing anything from her at all, not her approval, not an apology I'd long since stopped waiting for.
Just an ordinary goodbye between two people who used to matter to each other more than they did now.
I sat there with the phone still warm against my ear, my chest doing something I hadn't expected, a lightness I didn't have a name for yet.
It wasn't relief. Relief was what you felt when a threat passed you by. This was something else. This was the feeling of choosing a life on purpose instead of backing into it because the alternative scared me less.
I thought about calling Derek right then, phone still in my hand, his name sitting right there in my recent calls. I set the phone down on the passenger seat instead.
He deserved better than a decision handed to him over a phone line between errands, tucked into the same conversation as garland and mugs and a candle Maddie had bought purely to make me laugh.
He deserved the version where I looked him in the eye and told him plainly, the same way he'd looked at me in an empty firehouse bay the night he finally said Boston out loud.
I wanted to watch his face do whatever it was going to do when he heard it.
I wanted the moment to actually mean something, not slip past him unnoticed between a dispatch call and a truck check.
I drove home turning it over, already rehearsing exactly how I wanted to say it, some version steadier and surer than the one I'd handed Diane a few minutes ago, a version built specifically for him and no one else.
He had absolutely no idea, going about his own afternoon somewhere across town, that I'd already made the decision he'd spent three days quietly worrying over without ever once asking me to hurry it along. He had no idea it was made, and happy, and entirely his.
I intended to fix that soon. Just not yet, not over a phone, not folded in between errands like an afterthought. Some things deserved to be said properly, standing still, with nothing else competing for the room.