They held on through the next station, where no one seemed to board and the platform lights looked lonely as forgotten birthdays, and through the next, where a man in a Santa hat waved at the train for reasons known only to him and possibly eggnog. Sleep finally took Claire in pieces; her head tipped toward the window, then toward him, and he shifted so her temple could rest against the camel shoulder of the coat she still wore without asking permission he hadn't earned. He stayed awake. He watched the reflection of her face in the glass—the arched brows softened by sleep, the pink mouth relaxed of its liner's precision, the platinum hair a pale river over white fur and camel wool—and felt the strange, fierce protectiveness of a man who has been handed something fragile by accident and does not intend to drop it, even if keeping it means rewriting Chicago, rewriting Christmas, rewriting the careful loneliness he had mistaken for strength.
Near dawn, the sky went from black to the bruised blue of winter mornings, the color of a held breath before snow. Claire woke with a soft sound of confusion, then recognition, then the delicate panic of intimacy remembered in daylight's first draft. She sat up. She did not pull her hand away; sometime in the night their fingers had stayed knit, stubborn as good joinery. A smear of soft pink blush had transferred faintly to the camel coat's collar. She touched it with one finger, winced, laughed under her breath.
"Hi," she said. Her voice was sleep-rough, less department-store, more human.
"Hey... yeah, hey, hi," he answered, deliberately, reconstructing the disaster of the platform with tender mockery, and her laugh this time was quiet and wrecked with fondness, the laugh of someone who had decided the joke belonged to both of them now.
"If you say merry train before coffee, I will throw you into the baggage car with your honest walnut and let the table teach you manners."