And as it happened, the Woodward House’s living room housed the town’s most beautiful and most expensive piano, which sat in the corner across from the Christmas tree, waiting to be played.
Kate wandered over to the ancient Steinway. Her fingers only just brushed the ebony cover. It shot a thrill through her, like touching a holy relic; she needed to approach with reverence.
“We’re going to smoke him out of his room.”
“How?” Michael asked, as she lifted the cover and took her place on the bench. Shaking his head, he immediately began a muttered stream of vain prayers. “Don’t say with song. Please don’t say with song.”
Her fingers touched the keys. Out of tune. She winced, but pressed forward.
“With song,” she confirmed.
It was perfect, really. So much had already been written and spoken about the power of music, Kate didn’t think twice about this stage of her plan. Music spoke to the soul in a language unwhispered by any other tongue. Her screaming after him about the magic of the season wouldn’t work, but her joyful voice raised in song might be enough to coax him out of his hiding place, wherever that might have been.
Michael didn’t share her optimism.
“We’re doomed. We’re totally doomed. This isn’t a song and dance kind of guy, Kate.”
“I know.” She cracked her knuckles. It was going to take a lot of singing to cover the flaws of this piano’s lack of tuning, but she never backed away from a challenge. Besides, she listed “singing Christmas Carols” as one of the Special Skills on her resumé. Without knowing it, she’d trained for this exact moment her entire life. “That’s why this is going to work.”
“And what’s your plan after this, hmm? Make him fall in love with you and the town like one of those movies you love so much?”
“I’m not going to fall in love with Clark.”
“Right. Because you’re going to be an old maid and Miller’s Point and the festival will be your family and your children. I’ve heard this speech before. Besides, I didn’t say anything about you falling in love with him. I said he would fall in love with you.”
“Love doesn’t factor into this plan at all,” she rushed out, eager to be done with this particular conversation. Whenever she and Michael broached the topic of her love life, they played out the same old song and dance. She reminded him that romantic, all-consuming, life-changing love never entered her mind as a possibility for herself. The pickings in town were slim and most of the people they went to high school with were paired off by the summer after senior year. And even if some handsome stranger did ride into town and she did want to fall in love with him, she wasn’t even sure she knew how to go about doing it.
And then, he’d remind her that anyone could fall in love—no one knew how to fall in love; it just happened—and they’d go around and around in circles. She didn’t have time for circles and talk of romance today, especially not in the context of Clark Woodward. “We’re going to do Christmas our way. And…” Her fingers ran along the keys, testing them out one by one in no particular order. She struggled to articulate what about Clark she struggled with or how she planned to get the best of him. “He’s got this thing about him. He’s lonely. I can tell.”
“He’s inherited a corporation worth millions of dollars, at least. I think he cuddles a body pillow stuffed with hundred-dollar bills every night.”
“The money doesn’t matter.”
“What do you mean, the money doesn’t matter?”
Before this morning, Kate never would have made such a bold claim. She lived in a two-and-a-half-room apartment above the town’s only bookshop. A broken lock barely kept her door closed and she existed on a steady diet of diner food and gas station salad bowls. If anyone knew the importance of money and the detriment of not having it, it was Kate. But when faced with Clark, she didn’t see a rich man or a happy one. He was someone desperate to hide his own crippling solitary confinement. He believed himself above Christmas because he believed himself above people in general, a fact Kate was out to prove completely false.
“It doesn’t. I mean, I thought it did, but there’s something there. Or, something isn’t there. And if we can give it to him…”
Michael nodded and helped himself to the opposite end of the piano bench as Kate continued to noodle some random melodies. She operated on muscle memory, barely pressing the keys for noise.
“He may just want to give us the festival.”
“And he’ll be a better man for it.”
Michael huffed a noise under his breath. Clearly, transforming Clark into a better man ranked low on his list of priorities. For a while, nothing passed between them but the music pouring from her fingers. Kate recalled Clark’s enraged voice when he heard the music upon first entering the house. Once he heard the live thing, it would only be a matter of time before he sprinted down here to stop her. Then, she’d have him right where she wanted him. Michael gave her an unreadable look, creeping into the corners of her vision like rolling fog.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you like him.”
Kate choked on her own laughter. Clark Woodward was arrogant. Prideful. A complete miser with no regard for the happiness or safety of others. He was a tyrannical boss and a rude host. And he’d never read Dickens. Who graduated with an MBA without reading Charles Dickens at least once? She couldn’t ever see herself liking someone who hadn’t read the greatest in the English canon, even if he did light
