Healed Under The Mistletoe. Amalie Berlin

      She’d reached the bank of lockers when she heard her name and turned to look back at him. He still had that stoic, measuring manner, but with his arms uncrossed he didn’t look as forbidding. He looked almost open. And even with the strange scrubs-and-button-down-shirt combination, she could tell he could devastate half the female population by putting on a suit.

      “If you have questions about diagnoses, you may ask them of me. Use the comm.”

      She felt herself smile before she knew it was coming. “Thank you. I will. And I’ll go home and start reading. I don’t have anything on the schedule tonight in terms of sightseeing.”

      “Sightseeing?”

      Was he actually being polite? Even if the subject was hard, a glimpse of civility gave her hope.

      “I’m taking pictures of Christmas in New York to send to my sister.”

      “Not going home for the holidays?”

      “No.” She shook her head, falling back into the usual way she spoke of Noelle—the only way that let her keep any control over her emotions: by using the present tense. “We usually go somewhere for Christmas, no other family. But not this year.”

      “Perhaps next year.” Polite, but the words he’d said in kindness stuck in her chest. There would be no next year. No looking forward to things Noelle would never do. The trips they’d never take. The children she’d never have.

      The polite thing for her to do would be to ask if he was going home for the holidays, but her throat had clogged with the boulders of everything that could never be and filled with the sands of regret and grief, feelings she always tried to keep shoved down. It would’ve also been polite to say goodnight now, but no sound could pass through the whole world blocking her dry throat.

      All she could do, all she had been doing for more than a year, was try and put it out of her mind until later.

      Besides, she had tasks to accomplish. Tonight, she’d start simple, visit the boutique coffee shop near the hospital’s gift shop for a gift card, and pray it fit through the vents on the front of his locker.

      Then she’d have the weekend to come up with other gifts she could shove through the narrow openings.