That was the rule. And Lily took it extremely seriously as the gift choosing officer of the household, which meant she selected the gifts from under the tree with the gravity of a curator and handed them out in an order she'd apparently determined based on criteria she kept private. She gave Emma's gift to her first. It was a book that was the shape of it, clearly even wrapped. Emma opened it carefully and looked down at the cover and felt something tighten in her chest.
It was a first edition, not old enough to be rare, but old enough to be significant, a novel Emma had mentioned once weeks ago in a passing conversations about books she'd loved as a girl. She hadn't emphasized it. It had been a paragraph in the middle of a longer conversation. She barely remembered saying it. He had remembered.
She looked up at Ethan. I looked for the edition you would have read, he said. Your mom's copy that you told me about. I couldn't find that exact print, but this is close. Emma looked at the book.
She looked at the worn edges of the cover, the particular weight of a thing that had been held by other hands before hers. Ethan. Yeah. She couldn't finish the sentence immediately. She held the book in both hands and breathed through the thing happening in her chest, which was not sadness, but the emotion adjacent to it.
The one that came when something was too good, when care was too specific, when you felt completely seen by another person, and the feeling was almost more than you could hold without spilling. "Thank you," she finally said. "You're welcome, Lily." Observing this exchange, with complete attention, nodded to herself. Then she handed Ethan his gift from Emma, which was a set of restoration tools, a specific kind, one he'd mentioned needing twice, and hadn't gotten around to buying, and she'd spent two weeks finding the right ones.
He opened it and looked at them and looked at her with the same quality of recognition had felt looking at the book. How did you know, youber? And then again, the Thursday with the drawer joint. She paused. I pay attention too.
He held her gaze. Yeah, he said quietly. You do. Lily, satisfied with the emotional tenor of the evening. Opened her gift with significantly less restraint than the adults and produced a sound of pure joy that filled every corner of the house and broke the moment open into something light and warm and full of her.
The Christmas movie played at 9:00. It was the one with the brothers. Emma sat on the couch with Lily tucked against her left side, already fading towards sleep with the slow gravity of a child whose body had finally run out of Christmas Eve. Ethan was on Emma's right, close enough that their shoulders touched. The brother's scene came.
Emma kept her eyes on the screen. She felt beside her the very subtle change in Ethan's breathing a slight depth, a brief stillness. She did not look at him. She reached over and found his hand and held it the same way he held hers in the truck the day he said I love you palm to palm fingers closing no commentary his hand tightened over hers she felt rather than saw what his face was doing she kept looking at the screen and held on and said nothing because she understood that this was what carrying looked like not rescue not performance not the dramatic gesture of someone arriving to solve a crisis just presence just being the thing that was there when a person needed something to hold on to. By the time the credits rolled, Lily was fully asleep against Emma's side.
Both hands curled up near her chin, her breathing deep and even an absolutely trusting. Emma looked down at her. Ethan looked at Emma looking at his daughter. She's going to be upset. She fell asleep before the end.
Emma said quietly. She falls asleep every year. She thinks she's watched the whole thing. Do you tell her? No.
He looked at Lily. Let her have the version where she made it. Emma looked at him. He was looking at Lily the way he always looked at her. The specific unguarded quality of a man who had decided that loving this child was the axis his entire life turned on and built everything else outward from that fixed point.
We should put her to bed. Emma said they did it together. Ethan carried her the same motion as that first evening in September. Practiced and sure her weight familiar in his arms. Emma pulled back the covers.
They tucked her in without waking her and the purple cast was long gone, but Lily still slept in the way she developed in its absence slightly guarded on the left side. The memory of protection still living in the muscle. They stood in the doorway for a moment. Then they went back to the living room and sat on the couch in the quiet of the house after Christmas had arrived and they were on the other side of the evening and the tree was lit and Gloria had gone to bed an hour ago and the movie was done. Emma leaned her head back against the couch.
I keep thinking about September, she said. Yeah, I keep thinking about who I was walking down that street every day with my headphones in and my mind completely blank. She paused. I was so sure that blank was the best I was going to get. That wanting more was just asking for something I didn't deserve.
He turned his head to look at her. You deserve this, he said. Just so that's clear. I know. She smiled at the ceiling.
That's the thing. I know it now. It feels like information I always should have had and just didn't. Nobody has it until they have it. That's either very wise or very obvious.
Both. Most wisdom is. She turned her head to look at him. He was close. The kind of clothes that had become the natural distance between them.
The space that felt empty when he wasn't in it. "What do you want?" She asked. "From here, from whatever this is turning into." He was quiet for a moment.