Chapter 1 #3
She had counted nine. She had run shows for fifteen years, and she knew what nine seconds was. Nine seconds was a whole cue. Nine seconds was long enough to know you were doing it and to decide to keep doing it.
His hand in Brittany’s hair.
She straightened up and pressed both hands over her mouth, hard, because a noise was coming out of her that she didn’t want anyone in the building to hear. It wasn’t crying. It was lower than that and angrier. She held it in her hands until it stopped.
Then she took her hands away and looked at them.
They were still shaking. She was so angry that her whole body buzzed with it, from her scalp to her feet.
She wanted to go back out onto the mezzanine and over the rail and down onto that gold star and hit him.
She wanted to hit her. She wanted to rip the mistletoe off its wire and throw it through the dome.
She wanted, for one terrible second, to go home and get into bed and have him come in and tell her it was nothing.
That was the part that made her sit down on a box of glass ornaments and put her head in her hands.
Because she had seen his face. Before he kissed her, when Brittany was talking to him in the light, Caroline had seen his face change.
She knew that look. She had spent years being looked at like that.
She had not noticed exactly when it stopped.
She had only noticed, over this last year and a half, that the house was very quiet and that she ate dinner standing up at the kitchen counter most nights, and that when he came home he went to his study and closed the door.
Budget season, he had said, in October.
It was December.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She took it out.
Caroline. Please. Let me come up.
It buzzed again while she was looking at it.
It’s not what it looked like.
And again.
Where are you?
She turned the phone over on her knee and did not answer it.
Outside the stockroom door, the organ was still playing.
Through the wall, the crowd was going out, a long low sound like a river.
Somewhere under that sound was her father.
She thought about his face down by the organ.
She had not looked at him during the carols.
She didn’t think she could have kept her voice steady if she had.
There was a knock on the stockroom door.
Caroline stood up so fast the box of ornaments clinked. She wiped her face with the back of her hand, though her face was dry. “Who is it?”
“It’s me,” Luz said.
Caroline let out a breath. “Come in.”
Luz came in and shut the door behind her and leaned on it.
Luz Ortega was forty and five-foot-one and had run the Hadley’s holiday floor alongside Caroline for six years.
She had short black hair and reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she had once talked a man out of stealing a mink coat by asking about his mother. She was not a person who hesitated.
She hesitated now.
“He’s gone,” Luz said. “Security walked him out the Walnut Street doors. He didn’t want to go.”
“And her?”
“She left first.” Luz’s mouth went flat. “Out the side, before the choir finished. Didn’t look at anybody.”
Caroline nodded. She picked her clipboard up off a shelf and held it against her chest, because she needed something to hold. “The fire marshal was unhappy about the third-floor balcony. We need to move the rope back two feet tomorrow.”
“Caroline.”
“And the kid who lost his mitten, I want his parents’ name so we can send him something.”
“Caroline.” Luz came away from the door. “Stop.”
Caroline stopped.
“Your dad’s looking for you,” Luz said. “I told him I didn’t know where you were. He’s sitting on the organ bench. He looks about a hundred years old.”
“I’ll go down in a minute.”
“Okay.” Luz took off her reading glasses and folded them. She put them back on. She took her phone out of her back pocket and looked at it, and then she looked at Caroline, and her face was so sorry that Caroline wanted to tell her to put it away.
“What,” Caroline said.
“You should see this before somebody else shows you.”
“See what?”
Luz turned the phone around.
It was the station’s website. At the top of the page was a banner for the late news, with the station’s logo and a clock.
Under the banner was a still picture from the camera on the long arm.
It was the gold star, and the white circle of the spotlight, and two people inside the circle.
The picture was taken from above, from the side, and it was very clear. His hand was in her hair.
Under the picture, in red letters, it said: COMING UP AT 11.
Luz touched the screen, and the promo played. It showed the spotlight swinging. It showed the crowd chanting. It showed the kiss, and it did not cut away. Over the top of it, the anchor’s voice was bright and teasing and pleased with itself.
“The Hadley’s mistletoe lighting got a whole lot hotter tonight for one of Philadelphia’s most powerful men,” the anchor said. “The whole atrium was counting. So how long did that kiss really last?”
The video froze on Connor lifting his head.
“We have the tape,” the anchor said. “Tonight at eleven.”