He didn’t say anything else, but he pulled Leah into his arms. She felt his breath, hot on her neck, felt the warmth of the quivering kiss he pressed there. Then Rob snaked an arm around Erica’s neck, pulling her into their embrace, kissing her forehead.
“Come on, it’s freezing!” He steered them both back toward the warehouse, where they shook off their coats and pulled off boots and left everything dripping to dry in the hallway. Rob went to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee, and Leah settled on the couch under a blanket, still shivering in her nightgown.
Erica snuck away to her room to change out of her dungarees and sweatshirt, and appeared in the living room again clad in a nightgown before her father came back.
“So where were you?” Leah whispered as Erica snuggled under the blanket with her.
“I wanted to see the snow.” Erica didn’t look at her. Instead, she stared at the Christmas tree. “Remember how we used to wait for the bubble lights to start?”
“Yes.” Leah smiled, letting her change the subject. “You used to swear they were magic.”
“I wish I still believed in magic.”
“Me too.” Leah sighed, glancing up as Rob came into the living room carrying three mugs, one in each hand and another squeezed between. He put them on the coffee table, yawning and rubbing his eyes, blinking at the two of them on the couch. He had put his pajamas on for Erica’s benefit, Leah knew, because he’d only been wearing boxers when they fell asleep in his loft bed after making love last night.
She smiled at the memory, picking up her mug and taking a sip of coffee. The doctor in the hospital, Dr. Peters, the same one who had burst into the room minutes after Leah had given birth to Grace all on her own, had told her to wait “at least six weeks” before resuming any “sexual activity.” He’d added, “If I were you, I’d just keep your damned legs closed altogether and stay out of trouble.”
But once she was home with Rob, there was no way she could resist him. Besides, physically she was healed. It was just her heart that was broken.
“Mmm caffeine!” Erica cupped her coffee mug in both hands. “Are we ready to open gifts?”
“I thought we might get to sleep in on Christmas morning,” Rob looked pointedly at his daughter. “I didn’t expect to be up at five a.m.”
“It’s six,” Erica countered. “It’s present time, Santa!”
“Ho ho ho.” Rob lifted his mug and took a gulp of hot coffee. “I suppose you want to be helper-elf and hand out gifts?”
Erica popped up, rushing the Christmas tree like a linebacker and skidding across the hardwood floor in her socks, nearly overshooting it before grabbing their stockings and bringing them back to the sofa. The boxes under the tree were all beautifully wrapped-they’d been arriving that way for weeks from Hudson’s. They not only gift- wrapped purchases, they also delivered them.
Rob settled between the girls on the sofa as they each investigated the contents of their Christmas stockings. Rob had played Santa and filled the girls’ stockings, and Leah and Erica had pooled their albeit limited resources to fill his with things like film for his medium format camera and a new tie and pulled taffy, because it was his favorite. All of them had a big, fat orange at the bottom, and Erica started peeling hers so she could eat it right away.
Leah left hers at the bottom, looking at the array of things Rob had put into her stocking. New winter gloves. A slim, studded pocketbook for dress-up occasions. A bag of black licorice-one of her favorites. A little plastic globe of Boblo Island that rained silver glitter instead of snow. She smiled at him when she pulled that out, remembering how he had stood on the Boblo Boat deck and asked her to marry him.
Leah shook the little globe, watching the silver cloud envelope the model amusement park inside.
“Did you get an orange?” Rob asked, nudging Leah with his slippered foot. He had run outside without them, but they were on now, old blue raggedy ones. Leah and Erica had bought him a brand new pair. They were in the pile of gifts somewhere.
“Of course.” Leah reached into her stocking, pulling it out and putting on the coffee table with the rest of her things.
“I think there’s something else in there.” Rob looked at Leah’s stocking-he had purchased it for her just a week ago, because her stocking, the one she’d had since she was little, was at her mother’s. It was the house she’d grown up in, but she didn’t think of it as home anymore, Leah realized. This was home, the warehouse with its wide open spaces and drafts, where she slept high up in the loft with Rob every night. In the weeks since she’d been back, this had become home.
“Daddy, the orange is always the last thing,” Erica reminded him, popping a wedge of hers into her mouth. “That’s tradition.”
“You might want to look again,” Rob insisted.
Erica frowned turning her red and green stocking upside down and shaking it. “Nope. Nothing in there.”
“Not you, Erica.” He laughed, watching as Leah reached into her red stocking-it had her name embroidered at the top, just like Erica’s did-feeling around in the toe.
“What…?” She looked at him sitting beside her on the couch, feeling the shape of the velvet box under her fingers, eyes growing wide.
“What is it?” Erica inquired from her perch on the arm of the wing-backed chair on the other side of the coffee table. She’d moved so she could spread out her loot.
“Leah…” Rob moved from the sofa, onto one knee on the hardwood floor, and she looked at him in his raggedy slippers and mis-buttoned pajama top, his hair still damp from his trek through the snow to find his missing charges, and thought she had never loved him more than in that moment.
“Oh, Rob…” She felt tears stinging her eyes and couldn’t stop them as she brought the blue velvet box out of her Christmas stocking with shaking hands.
“Listen, I know…” He took a deep breath, and then took her hands in his, closing them around the velvet box. “Things have been hard. And I know it’s soon, too soon after…”
She shook her head, thinking of Grace, knowing he was thinking of her too. At least she’d gotten to see her, hold her. Rob had never even seen his daughter’s face.
“But I don’t want to lose you, Leah. I don’t want to be without you, ever again. I woke up this morning and found you gone, and I thought… it was like my heart had just walked out the door by itself.”
Leah held back a sob, knowing that feeling so well she lived it every minute. She had lived it for months at the maternity home, missing him with every breath she took like having razor blades in her lungs, and now she had him back, but her baby was gone. She closed her eyes, remembering her wish, feeling tears fall.
“I know you wanted a miracle,” he whispered. “On this day of all days, I wanted to give you one. I wanted to bring her home for you today.”
Leah nodded, opening her eyes, seeing him through prisms, and tried to speak, but nothing came out.
“I promise you, Leah. I promise I will stop at nothing to find Grace and bring her home.”
Rob fumbled with the box, opening it, and Leah saw the Tiffany’s logo on the white satin top, and the platinum band with the diamond solitaire framed in velvet sitting in the bottom.
“Will you marry me?” he asked, meeting her eyes, his so serious, like he thought she might say no. Leah shook her head, unable to speak, tears choking her throat. “So when our little girl comes home, she’ll have her family waiting for her?”
Leah sobbed, throwing her arms around his neck, whispering her assent. “Yes, yes!”
Rob held her close, kissing her deeply before presenting the ring to her, this time out of its box, sliding it onto her trembling ring finger. She looked at it in the dawning early morning light now streaming in through the skylight. It fit perfectly.
“I told him your ring size,” Erica said through a mouth full of Bit O’Honey she’d gotten in her stocking.
“You knew?” Leah blinked at her.
“He bought the ring months ago.” Erica revealed this secret with glee, seeing her father’s face flush.
“I knew you’d come back to me.” He met Leah’s eyes and she saw how his glistened in the light. “Just like I know we’ll get Grace back.”
Leah let him sweep her into his arms, standing and twirling her around in front of the Christmas tree, pulling her close so he could kiss her properly, if a little reticently, in front of Erica.
“I hope so,” she murmured against his chest as he held her, stroking her hair, and she met Erica’s eyes,
