But some small stubborn part of him kept returning to the pause before she asked the question. The half second where her expression had shifted into something more deliberate than casual conversation usually allowed. That same morning, before any of that had happened, an envelope had been delivered to Alexandra's office. on the outside in handwriting that was clearly a child's. Someone had written simply for Alexandra with no last name and no title attached. Inside was a small handmade card, the kind put together with construction paper and careful uneven letters.
Grace had met Alexandra exactly twice, both times when Caleb had no choice but to bring his daughter along to the office after school let out early. In the card, Grace thanked Alexandra for something specific for no longer keeping her father at work so late on Friday nights. a small habit the girl had apparently noticed and appreciated more than either adult realized. And then at the very bottom in the same uneven handwriting was the line that made Alexandra sit motionless at her desk for a long moment afterward. Her father smiled more whenever he talked about her. Alexandra had not mentioned the card to Caleb.
She was not entirely sure even to herself why she was holding on to it. She had read the line perhaps a dozen times that morning. Each time telling herself she would set the card aside and return to the pile of reports waiting on her desk, and each time she found herself reading it once more instead, turning the small piece of paper over in her hands as though it might reveal something additional if she studied it closely enough. It was a strange thing, she thought, to be undone by the handwriting of a 10-year-old. And yet, there she sat, undone all the same.
Alexandra would be spending Christmas alone that year. Her parents were traveling somewhere in Europe, sending postcards instead of phone calls, and her younger sister lived on the other side of the country with a family of her own. She had turned down every holiday invitation from colleagues. Unwilling to let Christmas dissolve into another networking event disguised as festivity, she had grown accustomed to hotel rooms, conference tables, and dinners ordered through an app and eaten alone at a desk. It was a life built entirely around competence.
And competence, she had learned, did not keep a person warm on Christmas Eve. So when Caleb mentioned, almost by accident, this idea of a Christmas girlfriend his daughter had invented for him, something in Alexandra reached for it before she could stop herself. Grace's card was still sitting in a drawer in her office, unanswered and unmentioned. Alexandra found herself wanting to know with an intensity that surprised her what would actually happen if she walked through that front door on Christmas Day. Whether Caleb would be relieved or startled or something in between that neither of them had a word for yet.