“Maren, I’m divorcing you, not asking you to ruin my career… you promised you’d finish those windows before any of this happened with Joanna.”
Blake Denham wants to leave their marriage for another woman and still have Maren finish the Christmas display that could make his career. She refuses. Three weeks after he leaves, she learns she is pregnant. She never tells him.
Seven years later, their daughter Willa wants to meet her father. Maren knows how to reach Blake, and she knows she has waited too long. She has to tell him the truth without deciding for Willa what their relationship will become.
Then Simon Vale offers Maren a paid chance to create a Christmas window under her own name. He notices the details Blake claimed as his, and the person behind them. The work draws them closer just as Blake’s return makes the life Maren built feel suddenly exposed.
Maren can give Willa the truth and still protect her choices. She can claim credit for her work and risk wanting Simon after the holidays. But first she must stop treating silence as a way to hold everything together.
Chapter 1: The Unfinished Version
New York, 5 March 2019
“Maren, I’m divorcing you, not asking you to ruin my career… you promised you’d finish those windows before any of this happened with Joanna.”
Blake set his keys beside the little cardboard bakery she had made after dinner. One slid down the roof and took the chimney with it.
Maren caught the chimney before it rolled off the table.
“You’re divorcing me?”
She knew what he had said. It was a stupid question, and she hated that it was the first one she had found. He had been strange for weeks, kind when she expected impatience and impatient when she put a hand on him. Last night he had folded his shirts. Blake never folded anything he thought she might eventually pick up.
“Yes. The Singapore transfer’s confirmed.”
He took off his coat, and for one foolish moment she thought that meant he was staying to explain. He draped it over the chair holding her drawings and checked the lining for his phone.
“You said they weren’t deciding until April.”
“They moved quickly.”
“Apparently.”
The bakery’s tiny cakes waited beneath a dome cut from transparent packaging. She had put a crooked one at the back, where a real baker might hide it from customers. Blake had told her the cakes were too small for anyone to notice.
She held the chimney against her thumb.
“Is Joanna going?”
He looked up.
Maren had wanted him to say no. Even now, after the sentence about leaving, some obedient part of her wanted an explanation she could work with.
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“Please don’t do this.”
She put the chimney down. He reached across her for his phone, close enough that she could smell the soap he used, and the familiarity of it hurt more than the word yes.
“How long, Blake?”
“Since January.”
In January she had spent two nights making him a presentation model while he slept because he had an early meeting. In February he had brought her tulips from the shop downstairs. She had trimmed the stems with the good scissors, the ones she never used for anything but paper.
He sat in the comfortable chair.
“I didn’t intend to hurt you.”
“What did you intend?”
“I wanted us to be sensible.”
“Sensible.”
“You’re good at this.” He gestured at the table. “You love doing it. We can still work together.”
The Christmas windows had been her idea: a little town where the people in the houses exchanged presents after the shop closed. He had taken the drawings to work, obtained the budget, and accepted the congratulations. Last autumn, she had promised to finish the display and its portfolio models. She had made that promise to her husband, before she knew what was happening with Joanna. She had been proud of him. Proud of them.
Now he expected those miniature recreations for an October portfolio presentation that could move him from the new Singapore post to a regional director’s job. Seven months away. He had allowed himself plenty of time to leave her and remarkably little time to explain it.
“We can agree a fee,” he added.
She almost said yes.
Her mind produced the arrangement with horrible speed. There would be calls about the models. Photographs to send. Reasons for him to ask how she was, an excuse to make him laugh. Seven months in which he might remember who she had been to him.
He leaned forward, sensing her hesitation.
“I knew you’d understand.”
“No.”
He stopped.
“No what?”
“You’ll need someone else to finish them.”
“Someone else won’t understand the mechanisms.”
“Then you’ll have to explain.”
“Maren, don’t make a decision because you’re upset.”
She picked up her yellow tape measure. He had written M.H. on it the Christmas they moved in together, when she was forever losing it under the sofa. The black initials had nearly worn off. She had loved that he noticed what she needed.
Her hand closed around it.
“I can be upset and still know what I mean.”
She lifted his coat off her drawings and held it out.
New York, 5 October 2026
The princess would not fit through the door.
Willa pushed her harder. The cardboard castle shuddered, dropped a battlement and surrendered its left-hand wall.
“She needs a bigger house,” Willa said.
“She needs to take the saucepan off her head.”
“It’s a crown.”
“It’s a very ambitious crown.”
Maren reached beneath her knee for the yellow tape. Willa caught her wrist with an orange-sticky hand.
“Don’t fix it yet. She’s escaping through the wall.”
“Of course she is.”
Maren sat back on her heels. The princess, a wooden spoon in a tea-towel skirt, staggered through the wreckage at a commanding angle. Willa supplied a deep voice.
“Bring me a horse.”
“That’s the king’s horse.”
“He can walk.”
Maren laughed. Willa grinned, then reached for the puppet’s missing shoe, which had been a button until yesterday.
They had eight minutes before they needed to leave for school. Maren had spent four of them looking for a reading book that was now propping up the castle’s remaining wall. Her daughter had an explanation ready before she asked.
“It’s a foundation.”
“It’s due back today.”
“Only until school.”
Maren slid a folded cereal box into its place. The castle sagged but remained upright.
Willa set the princess in her lap.
“Did my father like making things?”
Maren rested the book against her knee.
“He liked drawing them.”
“Would he like this?”
“I don’t know.”
That was the answer she could honestly give. She had no idea what Blake would make of a wooden spoon demanding a horse. She knew how he used to behave when he was tired, what he ordered for lunch, which compliments he remembered. None of it told her whether he would sit on a rug to hear his daughter speak in a princess’s terrible voice.
“Have you told him?” Willa asked.
“Not yet.”
“You said you would.”
“I know.”
Willa pulled a loose thread from the tea-towel skirt. “Before my birthday?”
“Yes.”
“Can I tell him about the puppets?”
“When we’ve spoken, we’ll work out how you can talk to him.”
“Is he going to be cross?”
“With me, probably.”
“Why?”
“Because I should have told him about you a long time ago.”
Willa considered that. Then she put the princess into Maren’s hand.
“Hold her. I need my other shoe.”
Maren held the wooden spoon while her daughter crawled beneath the table. She had prepared for tears, for another question she could not bear to answer, and found herself disarmed by the familiar small bottom sticking out between the chairs.
She put the princess down carefully and fetched Willa’s coat.
At the school gate, Willa remembered the reading book, took it from Maren’s bag and ran inside without looking back. Maren stayed until she had disappeared, then stepped aside for a father carrying a lunchbox with a broken handle. His daughter was explaining that the handle had broken by itself.
“Very mysterious,” he said.
Maren walked home with her hands in her coat pockets.
She had known how to find Blake for years. His studio email appeared beneath his photographs of hotel openings and enormous shop windows. She had looked, sometimes, when she could not sleep. At first she had imagined telling him as a punishment. Later she had told herself she would wait until she could do it without anger. By then she was afraid of what he would say about the waiting.
Willa had learned to sit, walk, talk and ask where he was.
Maren had kept waiting.
At home she sat at the kitchen table before taking off her coat. The unfinished email was where she had left it last night.
Blake,
I need to speak to you about something personal and important. Please let me know a time when we can talk privately.
She had added her number, although it hadn’t changed.
The message looked absurdly ordinary. She could send it and still collect Willa at three. There would be laundry, the parcel she needed to post, a customer waiting for an answer about whether a miniature tram could run in both directions.
She deleted Sorry to trouble you from the bottom.
Then she pressed send.
For a few seconds she sat listening to a delivery van outside. Her palms had left two damp prints on the table.
An email arrived.
She flinched before seeing the sender.
Vale Play: Flagship window commission — paid design interview.
Maren read the first paragraph. Then she read it again with her glasses on, although she only needed them for close work and the screen was perfectly clear.
The new Vale Play flagship needed a designer for its Christmas installation. The team had seen photographs of the miniature tram she had built for a stationery shop in June. Would she attend a paid design interview at ten tomorrow?
She checked the fee twice.
It was a proper fee. Enough to cover preparation and an assistant’s time, rather than the promise of exposure to people who might eventually discover wallets.
She scrolled down to the signature.
Simon Vale.
Not his assistant. Not the store’s decorative-possibilities team, if such a thing existed. The founder himself had signed the message.
Maren opened the company website.
She knew the toys. Willa had once spent twenty minutes assembling a town in the toy department while Maren calculated whether the smaller set would be enough and quietly decided it wasn’t the year for either. Vale Play’s products came in beautiful boxes with pictures that made adults want the room the toy was sitting in.
The founder’s photograph appeared halfway down the page.
Simon Vale wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled back. His light-brown hair needed cutting; he had a broad face, blue eyes and a smile that suggested he expected to enjoy the conversation he was about to have. He was leaning against a table covered in wooden pieces, looking at someone just beyond the camera.
Maren enlarged the picture before admitting to herself that she had no professional reason to.
He was attractive. Quite inconveniently attractive, considering she hadn’t yet decided whether she could go.
She closed the photograph and phoned Anika.
“Are you free this afternoon?”
“No.”
“How much of no?”
“Until four. Why?”
Maren read the invitation aloud.
There was a short silence.
“Vale Play?”
“Yes.”
“The actual one?”
“I don’t know of an imaginary one.”
“You could make one.”
Maren looked at the castle on the floor. “Apparently I’m having structural problems.”
“What do they want you to bring?”
That was the question. The attachment requested one existing piece and something that demonstrated her approach to play. No finished concept. No free pitch for the full installation.
“The tram?” Anika suggested.
“It’s in the shop window until November.”
“Ask to borrow it.”
“And leave them an empty window?”
“For one morning.”
Maren pictured dismantling the tram, explaining the favor, wrapping the little tracks so they didn’t shift. Then she pictured herself in front of Simon Vale while a tiny vehicle ran obediently between two stops. It was good work. It showed what she could build.
It didn’t show everything she wanted to make.
“I’ve got the market model,” she said.
“You’ve got half the market model.”
“I could finish the rest.”
“By tomorrow?”
“It only needs—”
“You’re doing the voice.”
“What voice?”
“The one where it only needs fourteen hours and two replacement hands.”
Maren stood and opened the cupboard above the workbench. Behind boxes of hinges and miniature lamps was a shallow tray containing a street market she had begun in August. She had completed a striped awning, three stalls and the front of a little shop. The rest was penciled marks on the base.
She had loved it when she started. Then two paid repair jobs came in, followed by the tram’s return mechanism, and the market had gone into the cupboard to wait for a more prosperous version of herself.
Anika was still on the phone.
“Don’t make me feel bad for being busy.”
Maren stopped with the tray in her hands.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were getting close.”
There were plenty of things she might have said about how often she had helped Anika. None would make her easier to work for.
“Sorry. Four is fine. An hour, if that’s what you have. Paid.”
“I can do an hour.”
“Thank you.”
After they hung up, Maren put the market on the table and pulled out her yellow tape.
She could add the missing buildings. Make a square at the center, perhaps a tiny Christmas tree, windows lit in different colors. She reached for a pencil, then saw the cardboard castle where Willa had left it.
Don’t fix it yet.
Maren turned back to the market.
She removed the shop front from its temporary pins and set it on the opposite side of the street. The stalls fitted behind it. She moved them again. Now she had a courtyard, an awning over a stage, a place for a wooden-spoon princess to make unreasonable demands.
She took a photograph of each arrangement.
At two, she replied to the invitation. She would attend at ten. She would bring an unfinished model.
Then she added one question.
Will I be allowed to move things?
Before she could reconsider, she sent it.
By the time Willa came home, Maren had cleared a space for her homework and laid the removable pieces in a box. Anika arrived at four, examined the model and spent most of her hour making sure the parts would survive a journey on the subway. She advised packing the awning separately because it caught on everything, and Maren argued before discovering she was right.
After Anika left, Willa put the princess behind one of the market stalls.
“She’s selling horses.”
“A sensible career change.”
“Did you tell him?”
Maren sat beside her.
“I sent him a message asking when we can speak.”
“Did he say?”
“Not yet.”
Willa ran a fingertip along the shop roof. “Can we keep the castle?”
“Yes. I’ll move it before I work tomorrow.”
“Don’t mend the hole.”
“I won’t.”
That evening, once Willa was asleep, Maren packed the market in an old cake carrier. She washed a paint mark from her navy trousers, brushed her shoulder-length black waves and tried pinning them back, then letting them fall again. The mirror offered a tired woman with olive skin, warm brown eyes, fuller cheeks and the dimple that appeared when she tried a smile. She did not look like the people in Vale Play’s advertisements.
She tried a different sweater anyway.
Her phone lit up on the bed.
For a moment she couldn’t make herself reach for it.
The message was from Simon Vale.
Please do. We’ve spent three months trying to make the place perfect. I’m beginning to suspect that’s the problem.
Below it was a second line.
Bring the unfinished version. I’d rather see what you want to try.
Maren read it once more, then set the rust-colored sweater beside her trousers.
Tomorrow, for the first time in a very long time, somebody wanted to see what happened when she started.