Claire, already two steps past, turned just enough. Her imitation was merciless and exact, pitched in a lower register that somehow still glittered:
"Hey... yeah, hey, hi. Have a-"
Then both of them burst into loud laughter—hers bright and unguarded, his startled into something boyish—and the sound rose together in the wood-paneled compartment she had just claimed, where the door still hung half open and the Christmas lights of the station blinked beyond the frosted window, and the laugh had not yet finished finding its end—
Claire Whitmore wiped at the corner of one carefully made eye with a gloved fingertip, still catching her breath, and Samuel Drake remained frozen just inside the compartment doorway with his recovered ticket crumpled in his fist like evidence of a crime he had not meant to commit. The laugh had broken something open between them too quickly, the way a sudden thaw cracks a river before anyone has checked whether the ice was safe.
"I should apologize," he said, when speech returned. His voice had the roughened warmth of someone who spent more time talking to wood and tools than to strangers in fur coats. "For the—merry train. That was—"
"Historic," she supplied, settling into the window seat as if the compartment had always belonged to her. The wood paneling glowed under the soft overhead bulb; the seats were the deep, slightly worn burgundy of trains that had carried a decade of holidays already. Brass fittings along the luggage rack caught the light like small, dutiful stars. "I've been wished merry Christmas. Merry New Year. Once, bizarrely, merry Arbor Day. Never merry train. You've expanded my seasonal vocabulary."