"Tell me something true," she said suddenly. "Not ticket-true. Person-true. We're stuck until Albany at least. Might as well skip the weather talk."
Samuel considered. The train leaned into a curve; the window filled with the black lace of winter trees, and beyond them, occasional farmhouse lights like punctuation in a long sentence of dark. He thought of the shop in Brooklyn, of Bevel the cat asleep on a stack of sandpaper, of his mother's voice on the landline asking whether he had remembered the warm gloves. He thought of the table in the baggage car, its legs wrapped in moving blankets, its surface protected by cardboard and hope.
"I almost didn't come," he said. "I told myself the table could ship. That Mom would understand. That Christmas is a performance and I don't have the lines memorized this year." He flexed his fingers, remembering sandpaper, grain, the slow reveal of beauty under patience. "Then I packed anyway. Put the Walkman in my bag with Dad's old cassettes of Christmas radio shows from the fifties. Figured if I couldn't feel festive, I could at least borrow someone else's nostalgia. There's one recording where a man describes the snow in Albany in 1953 as if it were a personal favor the sky had done him. I listen to it when the shop gets too quiet."
Claire nodded slowly. Her hands rested on the white gloves in her lap. "I almost didn't come either. My aunt thinks I'm bringing Grant."
"Grant."
"Grant Ellison. Finance. Perfect résumé. Perfect handshake. Perfect at explaining why my apartment is too small and my hours too long and my insistence on buying my own coats a charming eccentricity he hopes I'll outgrow." She looked at her reflection in the dark glass—platinum, winged eyes, the white fur like a cloud she had decided to wear as a thesis statement. "He proposed two weeks ago. At a restaurant with cloth napkins and a violinist who somehow made everything feel like a contract. There was a ring in a velvet box the color of caution. He got down on one knee as if he had rehearsed the geometry."