Elise's phone had buzzed twice. She'd glanced at it both times without responding. On the third buzz, she looked at the screen. Gavin caught only the name at the top, Grant B. And then she turned it face down on the table.
I don't want to impose, she said. You're not imposing. You're eating my leftover turkey and sleeping in a bed nobody else uses. Maryanne turned back to the stove. Sit down.
I'm teaching you how to make waffles. Elise sat down. She left her phone face down. Later, Gavin would think about that moment, the choice she made without making a production of it. At the time, he just noticed that she seemed to settle fractionally like someone who had been holding tension in their shoulders for a long time and had just decided to put something down.
Christmas morning was unhurried. Lucy came downstairs at 6:45 and was redirected back to bed until 7:30 by both her parents simultaneously, which was an act of rare coordination. When she finally came down for real, gifts were opened in the living room in pleasant, low-key chaos. Gavin got a new pair of work gloves from his mother and a book from Dana he'd mentioned wanting months ago and forgotten he'd mentioned. Elise got a candle from Maryanne.
I always give guests a candle. Don't read into it. And a drawing from Lucy of a woman with long dark hair and what appeared to be a very large hat. That's you, Lucy said. I love the hat, Elise said.
It's not a hat, it's your hair. Even better. At 10:15, Gavin's phone rang. He stepped into the hallway. The doc supervisor at the Roseville facility, apologetic, stressed, explaining that a storage system alert had tripped overnight, and they weren't sure if it was a sensor error or an actual pressure issue in the climate controlled unit.
They needed someone to walk them through the override protocol. Gavin spent 45 minutes on the phone. He pulled up the system documentation on his laptop, talked the supervisor through two diagnostic steps, and stayed on the line while they tested the secondary sensor. False alarm. The unit was fine.
When he came back to the kitchen, Elise was sitting at the table with a mug of coffee watching him. Christmas morning, she said. Yeah, you didn't have to pick up. He shrugged. Marcus is good at his job.
He wouldn't have called if he could handle it without me. Elise wrapped both hands around her mug. Doesn't it bother you that people just pull on you whenever they need something, even when you're off the clock? Gavin thought about it genuinely. If I can help and I don't just because there's nothing in it for me, then what do the principles I talk about actually mean?
Elise went quiet. Not the polite quiet of someone waiting for the conversation to move on. The other kind. The kind that meant something had landed. She looked down at her coffee.