People had been waiting all night. The prints went to Dottie, who pinned them, as they developed, to a corkboard she had titled in silver glitter THE WALL OF MERRY. The accounting team in matching sweaters. Fergus from the junior creative pool making a face like a startled owl. Bettina and her husband, who had driven in from the suburbs to be supportive and looked like a man being held hostage by joy.
At four minutes past nine, the tinsel curtain parted, and Wes Delacroix came through it holding a bag of ice.
He'd come in the back way, through the break room, which was so exactly like him that Margot nearly laughed out loud. He was wearing a grey suit with an olive cast to it, a white shirt, and a maroon tie with a small pattern that she knew, without having to see it up close, was tiny anchors, because it was the tie he wore when he wanted to feel like someone more competent had tied it. A silver watch on a brown leather band. His dark hair was doing what it did at the end of a long day, which was give up.
"Somebody said we were out of ice," he said, to the room in general.
"Nobody said that," said Bettina, materializing from nowhere. "We have four bags. Wes. You came."
"I was told there would be popcorn."
"You were told there would be a mandatory fun survey on Monday if you didn't come," said Bettina. "Ice goes in the cooler, please. The blue cooler. Not the red cooler. The red cooler is for—" And she was gone, pulled away by a crisis involving an extension cord and the coffee urn.
Wes put the ice in the blue cooler. Then he straightened and looked across the room, and Margot did not look away fast enough.
It had been a year and a half since they had been anything to each other but courteous. Courteous was a thing they had become very good at. They were courteous in the elevator. They were courteous in the Monday status meeting, where she ran the account side and he ran the creative side and they sat at opposite ends of the long table like the two names on a wedding invitation for a wedding that had been called off. They were courteous by email, which was the worst, because Wes in person was funny and quick and occasionally kind in ways that caught you off guard, and Wes by email signed off *Best, W.* as though he had been dipped in starch.
He came over. Anil, who had many virtues and loyalty foremost among them, did not leave. He simply became extremely interested in the Brazil nuts.
"Margot."
"Wes."
"You look—" He stopped. She watched him consider and discard four adjectives. "Festive."
"In a brave way," said Margot.
"Bettina?"
"Bettina."
He smiled, and it was the real one, the one that went crooked on the left side, and she felt it land somewhere under her sternum, where she had been keeping a small locked box for eighteen months.
And then—she would think about this for weeks afterward, about why, about whether it had been the cider or the hair or the eleven-second checking of the door—she saw, on the corner of the snack table, half tucked under the popcorn bowl, a Santa hat. Red felt, white trim, a fat white pom-pom. Somebody had worn it and abandoned it. And she gasped, a theatrical little intake of breath, the gasp of a woman in a department-store commercial who has just discovered a sale, and grabbed it.