Merry Christmas! I am so pleased to share a free sneak peek of a work-in-progress. Here are the first nine chapters of a project I’ve been working on (and off, and on, and off) for a couple of years. It’s still in draft form, but it’s taking shape.
Enjoy! And Merry Christmas 2025.
CHAPTER ONE
The cold quiet of the courthouse hallway was the best part of Claire Thomas’s day. It was the moment the battle noise faded, leaving behind the strange, sterile calm of victory. She loved few things more than walking away from a successful case. Claire finished things—she was a renowned expert at endings. Today, she’d finished the Hollis marriage, sealing the deal with the kind of clean, precise strike that made her courtroom famous.
“Another chaaaampion performance, Claire. Bravo!” David, who looked more like a high school senior than a new hire and recent law school grad, whisper-shouted in the hallway.
Claire offered him the professional smile—a practiced, tight fold of the lips that never reached the distant corners of her eyes. Lawyers like David only saw the win—they never saw the cost. But Claire saw the trembling in Mrs. Hollis’s hands, even as she was handed the papers that made her rich. So she simply filed it all away under “necessary collateral.” Claire was polished, yes, and she was successful, but the truth she carried was that when you spend your life mastering how to tear things apart, you eventually forget how to put yourself back together.
Claire rode the elevator up to her private office suite high above the chaos and traffic of D.C. The ascent felt like a forced scrub, cleaning the dirt of emotion from her skin. She closed the door, shutting out the murmur of the office. Because the applause, she knew, always fades.
The office was anchored by a massive mahogany desk that felt more like a throne than a workspace. Claire settled into her chair, letting the adrenaline of the fight drain out. The victory left behind the same feeling it always did: a deep, profound loneliness.
She didn’t reach for the Hollis file to review the final details. Instead, she opened the bottom drawer and pulled out a plain manila folder—the one she kept hidden behind the legal forms. It held two heavy blank sheets.
Her own divorce papers.
Claire took up her heavy fountain pen—the tool of her trade, the instrument of clean division—and began filling in the form. Claire and Ben Thomas. She approached the task with the same detached, clinical focus she used on any other case. She wasn’t heartbroken—she was simply filing a motion.
But the pen stopped short of the line marked grounds.
She stared at the empty space where she was supposed to list the failures. Where was the loud, messy explosion, the betrayal, the anger? Claire scoured her memories and found only silence. There’d been a slow, mutual drift into emptiness.
Her gaze lifted, catching her reflection in the dark glass of the window. A sharp, successful woman stared back. Perfectly dressed. Perfectly polished. Perfectly alone. And then the question, frightening and cold, slipped in:
What happens when you spend your whole life fighting to be right, only to wake up one morning and realize the thing you won is the exact loneliness that broke you?
Claire lowered the pen. She knew a storm was coming, she’d seen it in dozens of other couples. As she held the papers, she realized she wasn’t just writing an ending for Ben. She was writing the terrible final chapter for herself.
CHAPTER TWO
The hour drive on 66 West from D.C. home to Haymarket offered Claire a chance to breathe. In the city, she was invincible, unbeatable. She and Ben had moved to the suburbs to escape the perpetual knot of traffic, electric scooters, and political screaming. More than anything, they’d hoped a quieter pace would smooth the rough edges of their marriage.
Instead, the move had only exposed the hollow space between them. They called their golf course neighborhood “the sticks.” But the joke masked a deep truth—they were still desperate city people playing house in the suburbs.
Claire slid her key into the lock and pushed open the heavy door. The air inside hit first—a thick, aggressive wave that was nothing like the familiar scent of old wood. It was metallic, sharp with disinfectant, and heavy with the strange, persistent smell of medical equipment.
Though beneath the chemical smell, she caught something else. Olive wood? Ben had mentioned that Jay’s friend Abe, some artisan from the Shenandoah Valley, had dropped off firewood last week. “Good stuff,” Ben had said. “Burns clean.”
The victory of the courtroom—clean, orderly, and decided—shattered the moment she saw the wheeled oxygen tank standing sentinel in the entryway. Ben appeared from the kitchen, wiping his flour-dusted hands on an apron. He had the hopeful, almost frantic energy of a man trying too hard to hold a delicate thing together. Ben, the architect who built precise, soaring structures, was now finding his comfort in baking bread and mastering chili.
“You’re home! Perfect timing,” he said, kissing her awkwardly somewhere between her lips and cheek. The gesture was tender, fragile. “Dad’s settled in,” he said, pulling away.
Ben’s endless effort was exhausting, a demand for normalcy. But Claire felt like a trespasser in her own life, observing the rituals of a family she had already drafted the papers to abandon.
Claire followed him into the living room, a beautiful space that hospice staffers had turned into a blend of battle station and hospital room. Ben’s father, Jay, was resting in a deep, specialized recliner and surrounded by an army of machines. It was a steady, rhythmic hiss of an oxygen concentrator, the low, insistent beep of a monitor, and the tangled landscape of cords that crossed the Persian rug. This wasn’t just illness—this was noise, and the sound was suffocating. Every corner of the room was a reminder of the escape she plotted.
Jay was frail, the color leached from his skin, but his eyes were startlingly, cruelly clear. He saw Claire’s tension—the rigid posture, the clutched hands, the way she resisted touching the chaos.
“Welcome home, Claire,” Jay murmured, his voice raspy and rugged.
Ben knelt beside his father, adjusting a blanket, lost in loving attention.
Claire stood at the edge of the firelight, her expensive jacket making her feel like a foreign soldier in the warm, cluttered room.
Jay’s eyes found hers again, a look of profound, but gentle challenge. “Claire, are you happy?” His pace was slow and precise.
The question wasn’t a critique, it was an admission of what he saw. Claire quickly crafted an attorney’s response, but seeing Ben’s trusting, hopeful face, she couldn’t give it. She felt a wound open—not a fresh cut, but an old, deep fissure of self-awareness.
Claire managed only a nod and a polite escape toward the kitchen, but the warmth of the simmering chili did nothing to soothe the ache. She knew that the wound Jay exposed was deeper than any legal contract she could ever draft. The silence of her D.C. office felt like a distant paradise.
CHAPTER THREE
Night settled over Haymarket. But the quiet, smothering darkness did nothing to hush the house and Claire moved through the evening with mechanical grace. The couple ate standing in the kitchen, a habit born of years spent juggling two chaotic careers. Ben talked about his latest architectural sketch, and Claire responded with polite, one-word questions about foundation weight and beam stress. They spoke in the safe language of work, structure, and routine.
After the dishes were done, Ben turned from the sink, his face displaying a familiar, fragile hope. He reached out and gently took Claire’s hand, rubbing the faint, geometric lines the pen had left on her palm.
“I have an idea,” he whispered, as if sharing some sacred secret. “It’s about Dad. We have about five weeks until Christmas, right?”
“Right,” Claire exhaled.
Ben’s eyes shined with near childlike enthusiasm. “I want to make it perfect. Not just good, Claire. Perfect.”
He leaned against the counter. “He hasn’t seen a real Christmas in years. So why not give him the whole thing. Fresh pine, the old family ornaments—even the ridiculous ones he carved when I was seven—the music, the cookies, the works. I want him to know, even with all the wires and the beeping, that he is totally loved, treasured, one last time.” Ben seemed to search her face for an answer. “I know it’s a lot, and I know your schedule is nuts right now. But I really believe we can do this. Together. For him.”
It was surely the most vulnerable Ben had been since the diagnosis, and the weight of his wish crushed Claire. He didn’t ask her to love him. He simply asked her to perform an act of love for his father. It was an impossible request, made worse by its sincerity. An act, indeed.
Claire felt her professional smile stretch across her face—the tight, thin mask of agreement she wore for clients. “Of course, Ben. That sounds beautiful. We absolutely should.”
She squeezed his hand—a small, necessary lie—and pulled away, moving toward her home office near the front door to solace in her briefcase. But with each step away from Ben, an idea popped and flashed. His plan had given her a timeline. Five weeks. Throw in one more to get to the new year, and it provided a finish line. Just six more weeks. Surely she could fulfill the pact, help Ben deliver his perfect Christmas, and endure the performance until the new year.
Then she could finally sign those papers. Say goodbye. Start over.
The idea was a sudden, chilling breath of oxygen. She settled into her chair, pulled out the same folder, and thought the papers felt lighter than they had just a few hours earlier. Six weeks. Then she writes, and signs, her own ending.
CHAPTER FOUR
The days blurred into a strange, unsettling rhythm. Claire maintained her professional facade, driving to D.C. each morning, immersing herself in the clean logic of legal battles. When the sun set, she returned to Haymarket, to the endless hum of machines and the strong scent of cinnamon Ben insisted on baking into everything.
She tried to participate in Ben’s “perfect Christmas,” hanging a few ornaments, nodding at his plans for a sleigh ride, and even forcing a tight smile when he played Christmas music. Each of Claire’s reactions was a subtle calculation, a step closer to fulfilling the pact.
One evening, after the hospice nurse left for the night, Ben excused himself for an urgent call from a client and disappeared downstairs to his own office. Before settling into a comfortable chair in the living room to catch up on her own work, Claire straightened a slipping blanket on Jay’s lap. He seemed to be fast asleep, and she watched his slow and shallow, but steady breathing. The oxygen concentrator hissed its constant, lonely tune. As she stood near him, a pang of pity stirred. Her father-in-law was so utterly frail, so dependent. This whole charade, this impossible pact, was for him.
Later, in a reading chair in the opposite corner, Claire couldn’t help but notice how the room glowed from the overlit Christmas tree. She reached for her bag, intending to review some notes from a case file, when she noticed something odd.
The bag sat exactly where she’d left it when she came home—beside Jay’s recliner. She’d dropped it awkwardly, distracted by Ben calling from the kitchen about dinner. But now, looking at it from across the room, she could see the zipper was partially open, the leather flap askew. Had she left it that way?
Claire stood and crossed to her bag, a creeping unease building in her chest. She picked it up, the weight immediately wrong. Lighter. She opened it fully and began pulling out files, her movements becoming more frantic with each passing second.
The folder was gone.
Potent panic seized her. Her mind raced back along the highway to her office in D.C. David, her assistant, was in D.C. Ben never touched her things. No one else had access. Her gaze snapped to Jay.
His eyes were open now, watching her with that same clear, alert focus. And there, in his lap, resting against the faded blue of his pajama pants, was a cream-colored rectangle.
Claire’s breath hitched.
The folder lay open, just slightly, enough that she could see the bold text of the legal form inside. Jay’s frail hand, tattooed with age spots, rested on top of it, not possessive, but protective—as if he’d been guarding it. Guarding her secret.
How long had it been there? Since she arrived home? Since she’d carelessly dropped her bag beside his chair, too distracted to notice it slip free?
His hand moved slowly, deliberately. He reached toward her, the folder extended in offering. His eyes held no anger, no accusation—only a profound, quiet sorrow that seemed to echo through the hum of the machines.
She stood frozen for a moment, then crossed the room, her steps slow, like confessions. He held the folder between them, and the undeniable truth was laid bare. The pact, the performance, the elaborate lie she’d constructed around Ben’s fragile hope—all of it exposed.
Claire felt a hot flush creep up her neck. All the winning, all the polish, had vanished. She’d never felt so exposed, so trapped, so caught.
And the man who’d caught her was dying.
CHAPTER FIVE
The air in the living room thickened, suffocating the last remnants of Christmas cheer. Claire stood, her entire professional life—her carefully constructed fortress of control—imploding. She expected a betrayal to match her own. She braced for the fight that would finally allow her to justify leaving.
But the fight didn’t come.
Jay’s lips curved into a faint, exhausted smile. He pushed himself slightly up in the recliner, the movement costing him a visible effort, and held the folder out, not as evidence, but as an offering.
“I found this,” he whispered, his voice catching slightly on the oxygen. “I know I shouldn’t have, but …”
Claire felt hot shame and took the folder. Her fingers trembled as she clutched it.
“Jay, I—” but the words crumbled as they tumbled out. She had a thousand arguments ready for Ben, but none for this gentle, dying man.
Jay shook his head slowly, his eyes holding hers with a kind of clarity that cut through her fear. “No need to explain, Claire. I’ve felt it. Ben feels it. It takes a lot of energy to be so successful. Sometimes, there isn’t much left over for home.”
He paused, letting his words land, before delivering the twist that broke her.
“I know you need to leave, Sweetheart. You’ve been unhappy for a long time. But I have a selfish request. A very old man’s plea.”
Claire pulled the folder against her chest and folded her arms, like clutching a life preserver. Then she waited, steeling for a promise of a better settlement or a financial threat—something she could counter with logic.
“I have six weeks, maybe seven, maybe less,” Jay said. “Ben has convinced himself he can give me one last perfect Christmas. He’s poured his entire heart into it. And he believes—foolishly, beautifully—that you’re doing this with him. That you still love him.”
Jay breathed as deeply as he could, allowing the silence of the machines to fill the space. “Don’t destroy that, Claire. Not now. Not for him. Not for my last memory of my son’s happiness.”
He leaned forward. “Give him these six weeks. Pretend to love him until I’m gone. Just six weeks.”
It was an impossible request. It wasn’t about love or money, it was about mercy. The very thing Claire had spent her entire career avoiding. Jay was asking her to commit to a deeply intimate, prolonged lie—an act of compassion heavier than any judgment she had ever faced.
More shame, hot and toxic, flooded her. Jay offered grace, and she was powerless against it. She realized he hadn’t exposed her to gain leverage, he had exposed her to give her a chance to be kind.
“I…” Claire choked, managing only a nod. “I agree. And I’m sorry.”
The deal was sealed, not with a contract or a handshake, but with a shared, agonizing understanding that her performance had become even more complex. Claire walked out of the living room and fled down the hall, wondering why mercy felt so much heavier than winning.
CHAPTER SIX
Over the next few days, Claire tried her best to fake affection, holiday cheer, and forgiveness—and failed at all three. She was a master of legal argument, but a helpless amateur in the languages of love.
Her first test came when Ben asked her to help sort the old boxes of Christmas decorations. They were relics of his childhood, smelling of attic and old paper. Claire stood awkwardly by the box, wearing the thin, forced mask of holiday participation. Ben pulled out an ornament—a lopsided wooden figure Jay had carved decades ago—and laughed, his hope shining. Claire tried to laugh with him. But the sound was brittle and strained, like dry snapping kindling. She was incapable of meeting his genuine joy with anything other than polite observation.
The poor performance extended to Jay. Claire made a goal to sit beside his recliner each evening, armed with a novel, determined to project serene devotion. But instead of peace, the silence was a threat, forcing her to listen to the hiss of the oxygen machine and the shallow catch of his breath. The silence demanded intimacy, and Claire could only offer distance.
Her most humiliating failure came with her clunky attempt at forgiveness. Ben had been distant for years, consumed by the demands of his own work and the slow, inevitable decline of his father. Claire’s plan had been to argue that his emotional absence was at least partially the grounds for divorce. Now, forced to stay, she knew she should offer some small gesture of retroactive pardon.
One day after work she found Ben in the kitchen, carefully frosting more sugar cookies than the three of them could ever eat. She placed a hand on his shoulder.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey back. Good day?”
Claire nodded and patted his shoulder awkwardly before removing her hand. She watched him and smelled the sweet scent of icing. “Listen,” she finally said. “I know things have been hard.” She chose the closest thing she had to an olive branch. “But I understand. About, I don’t know, I suppose all of it. I get it. I really do.”
Ben turned, his eyes wide and confused, the frosting bag still clutched in his hand. “Understand what, Claire?”
“That is hard. That it’s been … Ben, I just want to say, I understand.”
“The fact that my father is dying?”
“What?”
“You just noticed that?”
Ben’s honesty was devastating, and the agreement with Jay was heavier than ever. Every corner of the house reminded her of what she was expected to be, and what she had failed to become. She was suffocating in the noise and the resentment she never acknowledged. Even with the pact and the performance, the house was less a home and more an emotional prison.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ben stood in the darkened doorway of the pantry, holding a bag of brown sugar so tight the plastic crinkled under his grip. He was watching his wife read a magazine to his dying father.
It was a scene he’d prayed for. Claire, sitting in the wingback chair, reading an article about market trends. Jay asleep, his head lolling on the pillow, lulled by the rhythm of her voice. To anyone looking through the window, it looked like a family. It looked like peace.
But Ben knew the difference between peace and politeness.
He watched Claire’s foot tapping against the leg of the chair. Tap. Tap. Tap. A rapid, nervous staccato that betrayed the calm of her face. She wasn’t relaxing, she was enduring. She was checking an invisible watch, counting the seconds until she could escape back to the sanctuary of her study or her office in D.C.
Ben found that familiar hollow in his chest. He wasn’t stupid. He knew
Claire had checked out of this marriage months ago, maybe longer. He knew she looked at him with the polite detachment of a stranger sharing an elevator. He knew the “late nights” at the office were just excuses to avoid the smell of sickness in their living room.
But Dad was dying. And Ben was terrified—a deep, paralytic terror that woke him up at 3:00 AM—that if he let go of the “perfect Christmas,” if he stopped baking and hanging lights, the reality of the loss would crush him.
He needed Claire. He didn’t need her to love him—he had accepted that loss for now—but he needed her to be there. He needed a witness. He needed someone to help him hold up the sky before it fell.
Claire finished reading and closed the magazine with a sharp snap. She stood up, smoothed her skirt, and walked out of the room without looking back at Jay, passing Ben in the kitchen with a tight, forced smile.
“Good night, Ben,” she said, not breaking her stride.
“Good night,” he whispered.
He watched her climb the stairs, her back rigid. He knew it was a performance. He knew it was fake. But heaven help him, he was going to take whatever scraps she offered, because even a fake wife was better than facing the silence of that living room alone.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The walls were closing in. The house in Haymarket had become a house of medical wires and unanswered hope. She couldn’t breathe in the constant presence of the hospice machines, and the demands of the pact. The failed performances, the strained smiles, it was all exhausting. She needed to step off stage.
The next morning, sitting in the driveway as the car warmed up, she sent a curt email to her assistant. It claimed she had an urgent, offsite meeting with a potential client and she’d be out all day. It wasn’t even a creative lie, but who cared? She just needed air.
She drove out of their gated community and toward 66, but instead of heading east into D.C., she drove west to the Shenandoah Valley. She passed Marshall, and watched the landscape soften from paved shopping centers to rolling, rural hills. She blew past Front Royal, and was faced with a quick choice of taking interstate 81 north or south. She flipped a mental coin and drove south past Strasburg, Toms Brook, and a huge water tower just feet off the interstate that invited her to “Discover Woodstock.” So she did, taking the next exit and following signs to its historic downtown.
The quaint main street was lined with century-old brick buildings, local gift shops, and small restaurants. There was no hum of commerce, no sky scrapers, no glass palaces. The stillness was a blessed relief.
Claire parked her car and simply walked, feeling the need to wander without purpose or a schedule. She visited a bakery, sandwich shop, and a bookstore with an owner so quirky and funny that Claire found herself laughing out loud with the perfect stranger.
Eventually Claire stopped before a narrow building with a sign above the door, hand-carved and painted deep green, that read “Abe’s Antiques.” The street window was crowded with mismatched hinges, rusty tools, and lamps with frayed wires—a glorious, messy jumble that appeared to lack any kind of organization.
She pushed the door open and a bell above her head jingled sharply. The air inside was thick and warm, smelling of wood shavings, dust, and something earthy, like cloves. She meandered slowly through the shop, running her fingers over the grain of an old dresser and the cool surface of tarnished silverware. There was nothing she really needed, but the array of items that survived decades fascinated her. The stories these trinkets could tell. The hands who’d touched them.
Claire had no way of knowing that her entire life was about to shift, not because of some grand plan, but because of a simple, forgotten bin of discarded objects.
CHAPTER NINE
The interior of the shop was a labyrinth of forgotten things.
Claire moved deeper into the aisles, her expensive heels tapping softly on the worn wooden floorboards. The air here was different. Slower, heavier. Dust motes danced in the shafts of light cutting through the high, grimy windows, swirling like tiny galaxies.
She passed a table stacked with heavy wool blankets and a shelf lined with mason jars. There were primitive tools. Hooks with plastic bags holding foreign coins and colorful bills. Three or four gigantic antique desks. A red, white and blue tricycle that looked as old as the building itself.
It was all so terribly inefficient. Nothing labeled. Nothing priced. It was a business model that would have given her firm’s auditors a collective stroke, but to Claire, it was oddly comforting. There were no expectations here. No one she had to fool. The silence didn’t demand a performance.
Claire stopped at a workbench near the back. It was covered in bins filled with hardware—brass knobs, iron nails, and a jumble of rusted hinges. She reached in, not sure why. Perhaps she just wanted to touch something that was ragged and real, something that hadn’t been polished to a shine. She dug her hand into a bin of mixed metal, sifting through the cold, jagged shapes.
Slice.
A sharp, hot pain raced through her index finger.
She gasped, jerking her hand back. A piece of metal—an old, broken latch—had cut her skin. Beads of bright blood welled up instantly, stark and alarming against her pale skin and the gray dust of the shop.
“Ouch, ouch, ouch,” she said, clutching her wrist. The blood began to run, threatening the cuff of her silk blouse.
“Careful there,” a voice said from behind. “The past has sharp edges.” The words seemed to tumble out from the shadows behind the counter.
Deep, gravelly, warm.
Claire looked up as an older man emerged from the back room. He wore a canvas apron covered in—well, everything. His face was a map of deep, kindly lines, and he had a shock of white hair and eyes that crinkled at the corners. He wasn’t alone. A girl, maybe seven or eight years old, peered out from behind his leg. She had messy pigtails and held a feather duster like a scepter.
“I … I cut myself,” Claire said, feeling foolish. The high-powered and oft-feared attorney, defeated by a bin of junk.
“I see that,” the man said. He moved with surprising grace for his age, rounding the counter. “Birdie, a clean rag, please and thank you.”
His eager helper nodded solemnly and dashed off.
Then the man took Claire’s hand in his own. His palms were rough, calloused like sandpaper, but his touch was gentle. “Deep enough to sting,” he said, examining the cut. “But shallow enough to heal.”
A moment later Birdie returned with a clean, white cloth. She handed it to the man, her eyes wide and curious as she looked at Claire’s shoes.
“Thank you,” Claire murmured. “Birdie?”
“Uh huh,” she answered.
“Well, thank you, Birdie.”
To Claire’s surprise, and perhaps concern, the man didn’t apply the cloth to the cut immediately. Instead, as it continued to bleed and red coated her finger, he reached into the pocket of his apron and pulled out a ring.
But not a ring like the platinum band Claire had worn for fifteen years. This was carved from dark, unfinished wood. It was thick, crude, and looked like it had been whittled by hand. “Put this on.”
Claire blinked. “A ring?”
“Olive wood,” he said. “The pressure helps. And the wood… well, the wood knows what to do.”
It made no sense, but the blood was dripping onto the floorboards now. Claire, flustered and confused, slid the rough wooden ring onto her index finger, right over the cut.
The fit was snug as the ring pressed against the wound.
And then, it happened.
The throbbing stopped.
It didn’t fade gradually, it simply ceased. The sharp, stinging heat vanished, replaced by a cool, grounding weight. It was as if the wood had absorbed the pain.
Claire stared at her hand. Bleeding had stopped, though her finger remained wet and warm with blood. The panic in her chest, the frantic need to run that had driven her out of D.C., quieted. Her shoulders dropped and she looked up at the man.
A small, knowing smile played on his lips. “Better?”
“I …” Claire flexed her hand. The ring felt heavy, but good. “Yes. It stopped. I mean, it just stopped.”
“It usually does,” he said. “I’m Abe. And the little one with the duster is Birdie.”
“Claire,” she said. The name sounded off in this dusty room, like a title she used in a former life.
“Lovely, Claire,” Abe said, wiping his hands on his apron. “It looks like the ring chose you. That happens sometimes. Usually with the people who come in here looking for nothing in particular.”
The ring was ugly. Unique. It clashed with her manicure and her diamond wedding. And she had never wanted to keep anything more in her life.
“What is it?” Claire asked, her words soft in the cathedral of the shop.
“Does it use pressure points? Like acupuncture?
Abe leaned back against the counter, crossing his arms over his apron.
“Maybe? It’s just wood. Olive wood, specifically. But the wood has a history. Everything in here has a history, if you listen.” He nodded at the ring. “That piece right there is rather old, I think. Perhaps even ancient.”
Birdie popped up from behind the counter, her chin resting on top. She watched Claire with solemn, stunningly dark eyes. “It’s a Manger Ring,” Birdie whispered, as if sharing some state secret.
“A Manger Ring?” Claire repeated.
Abe smiled again. “That’s the legend, anyway. They say the ring might’ve come from scrap wood in Bethlehem.” He tapped the counter. “All the wood in here is scrap, truth be told. I bought this wood for the counter right here on a trip to the Holy Land about fifteen years ago. From a dealer in the city who claimed it came from an ancient stable. His family had salvaged it many generations ago, before the old structures were torn down. No way to know, of course. But I had to have it, knew it would make a gorgeous desk or countertop. Paid an arm and two legs to ship it home.”
Claire couldn’t miss Birdie looking down at Abe’s legs and rolling her eyes.
Abe picked up another piece of wood from under the counter, holding it to the light. “This is from the same trip. I had it tested. Carbon dating. Came back somewhere between 1,800 and 2,200 years old. The right age. The right place. The right kind of wood.”
He looked at Claire, his eyes serious. “I can’t prove anything it’s from, you know, the manger. But I can’t prove it’s not. And sometimes, that possibility is enough. Right, Birdie?”
She nodded up at him with a pure faith Claire didn’t think she’d ever seen before.
“The legend or myth, or truth, if you prefer, says the wood draws out poison and pain. Not from the blood, but from the spirit. It reminds you that you don’t have to be polished to be useful. Rough things can hold holy weight.”
“Are you a minister or something?” Claire asked, and Birdie’s laugh seemed to answer the questions for them both.
“Hey now,” he said, playfully flicking her ear. “Don’t ruin my reputation.”
“I’m sorry, I just … this is … I don’t even know.” Once again Claire studied the ring. Rough wood for rough times. It was a fairy tale. A sales pitch for tourists. Her brain knew this. She should take it off, hand it back, and offer ten dollars for the bandage. She should leave.
But she couldn’t.
When she looked at the ring, she didn’t see a piece of scrap wood. She saw an anchor. She felt the heavy, suffocating pressure of the house in Haymarket—the machine noise, the lies, the pact with Jay—momentarily held at bay by the weight of it. Who cares if it’s a coincidental hoax? It’s more than she had when she drove out of her neighborhood that morning. “How much?” Claire asked.
Abe shrugged. “For the ring? Or the story?”
“For the ring.”
“Twelve dollars.”
Claire laughed. “That’s absurd,” she said with a nervous smile. “It’s not for sale, is it?”
“Like I said, twelve dollars.”
Claire could feel a sudden, frantic need to secure the ring before he realized who she was—a woman who could afford to buy the whole building but couldn’t afford to lose this small piece of peace. “How much, honestly? I’d love to take it home.”
“Fine, ten dollars,” he said, tossing his hands in the air in mock surrender.
Claire fumbled with her purse, her hands shaking slightly. She pulled out a twenty-dollar bill. “I’m sorry, here. Keep the change.” She placed the bill on the counter.
Birdie snatched the money, smoothing it flat with great importance. Then, the little girl reached under the counter and produced a small, velvet drawstring bag. She handed it to Claire with a nod and the sweetest of smiles.
“For safe keeping,” Birdie said. “In case you take it off.”
“Maybe I won’t,” Claire said. The words surprised her, but as soon as they hung in the air, she knew they were true. She wasn’t going to take it off. Not for six weeks.
“Be careful with the ring, Claire,” Abe said. “Old wood can be brittle. It’s sturdy, but can break if you aren’t gentle.”
“I’ll be careful,” Claire promised. “Thank you.”
After goodbyes, she walked out the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk. The wind had picked up, biting and cold, but her hand was warm. She rubbed her thumb over the grain of the olive ring. She had a six-week performance to give, a dying father-in-law to deceive, and a marriage to end. But for the first time in months, she knew she had something to hold onto.
END TEASER. STAY TUNED …