They spoke of Christmas traditions as the dark fields scrolled past. Her aunt's insistence on real candles on the tree, with a fire extinguisher standing by like a co-conspirator who had signed a non-disclosure agreement. The aunt's name was Margaret, called Meg, a retired schoolteacher who had never married and who collected porcelain angels the way some people collected grudges—lovingly, with dusty detail. Meg's Victorian in Burlington had radiators that clanked hymns and a front parlor no one sat in except at Christmas, when suddenly everyone sat in it and pretended the rest of the year had been a rehearsal. Claire had spent summers there as a girl, learning to sew crooked seams and to drink tea with the kind of posture that suggested spine was a moral quality.
Samuel's mother's house in Rutland was smaller, a Cape with green shutters and a kitchen that had always been the real living room. His mother's habit of leaving an empty chair at the table for whoever might need it—a custom borrowed from somewhere she could never quite name—would hurt in a new place this year. The chair would not be abstract. It would have a shape. His father's pipe tobacco still lived faintly in the curtains; Samuel had smelled it last visit and stood in the hallway longer than necessary, pretending to adjust his coat.
"Will you tell her?" Claire asked. "About Chicago?"
"Eventually. Will you tell your aunt about Grant? The thinking, not the yes?"
"Eventually." She traced a fingertip along the window's frost, drawing a small incomplete heart and then wiping it away as if embarrassed by her own hand. "Or I'll go home after Christmas and say yes because saying yes is easier than explaining a feeling I don't have a purchase order for. Grant is kind. That makes him dangerous. Cruel men are easy to leave. Kind men require essays."
"That would be a waste," Samuel said, too quickly, and then could not unsay it.