Page 18 of Greek’s Christmas Heir

She couldn’t have said why that felt so much like a chastisement. But it did.

That kept her awake, too.

For weeks and weeks.

More months rolled by and soon enough it was fall again. Her favorite season and this year she got to enjoy it with Natalia, who seemed like such a big girl to her now. She was so alert and interested, into everything, and very much her own little personality. Constance also got to be done with summer, which had been less fun.

Because while fielding the usual confusing interactions with Anax, Constance had been on a local damage control tour.

Her friends had all expressed amazement and betrayal, repeatedly, that she hadn’t told them anything about her lightning-quick wedding on Christmas Eve. Most of it joking—but not all of it. She’d had to explain that she still wasn’t all that sure she hadn’t hallucinated the whole thing.

Well,Kelly had said with a laugh,those rings sure look real.Mike could never.

The town found it harder to take. Or maybe it was that Constance had been naïve. She had truly believed that because she washer, people would accept what she was doing. What she’d done. She wondered if maybe they would have, if she hadn’t thrown Anax into the mix. After all, she was hardly the first single mother in Halburg. And for all Brandt’s big talk that day in the store, the fact was, they didn’t have anyone else for the nursery school. During the months she’d taken off, it had floundered—because Constance was the only one who’d ever been so dedicated to it.

If she hadn’t said anything about Anax, she could have become another one of those stories people told around here.

Always a bit of an odd bird,they’d say.She lived with her old grandma all those years. Then she went and got herself a baby, but not the old-fashioned way. She did it on an exam table.

But there was her mysterious husband. And her rings. And the fact that folks knew, now, that Anax kept turning up, but Constance never brought him around so people could get a look at him. It was a mystery that had kept everyone buzzing straight on through September.

What it was not, she supposed, wasgrandmotherly.Maybe that was what everyone found unforgivable.

Tonight was one of the town’s harvest festivals. There were those that liked Halloween and those that hated it, but like most things in Halburg, everyone got a bit of what they wanted in the end. They called it a harvest festival, but there was trick-or-treating up and down the street, and half the town made no bones about the fact that all the decorations were Halloween-based.

Constance had dressed herself as a chicken and Natalia as a cutely cracked egg, and she felt that they were obviously the cutest joint costume around. As well as a little bit of pointed commentary. Grandma Dorothy would have cackled.

She walked with Kelly and should have been having a good time, but she couldn’t seem to get past all the whispers that followed around after her.

“I hate that people are talking about me,” she said, shaking her head when her friend looked at her with a query in her gaze. “I really do.”

“You decided to have an interesting life,” Kelly said, and laughed. “That’s on you. You could have very easily coasted along the way you were. You could have kept your head down and no one would’ve had a bad word to say about you. But then, you wouldn’t have Natalia, would you? Or a mysterious husband whose name you won’t even share with your friends.”

“That’s in case it’s really a delusion,” Constance replied, grinning over her chicken feathers. “It would be so embarrassing if it turned out I made myself an imaginary friend, wouldn’t it? I’d be worse than Charlie Hannon and his conspiracy theories.”

As she said that, she felt a stir behind her on the main street they’d blocked off to traffic, not that there was ever much in the way of actual congestion in Halburg. Still, everyone in the county was out in the streets tonight, enjoying the cool, clear night. Constance told herself it was that chill in the air that prickled over her, the cold creeping in. Winter on its way.

Even though the sort of string she untangled nightly after one of Anax’s visits seemed to pull tight around the center of her.

Beside her, Kelly’s eyes got round and she stopped muttering threats in the direction of her misbehaving, sugared-up children.

“I don’t think you have to worry about your imaginary friend, Constance,” she said in tones of awe.

“That’s what I love about you,” Constance said merrily. Or maybe hopefully. “Always so accepting.”

“That’s not it,” Kelly replied. “He’s here.”

“What?” But as she asked that, she was turning.

And it was like something out of the sort of dreams she pretended she didn’t have on those nights she pretended she didn’t have trouble sleeping in the first place.

She turned and he was there, striding through the crowd as if he didn’t see all the people who leaped out of his way.

Maybe he didn’t. As far as she could tell, his gaze seemed to be trained entirely on her.

There was a lump in Constance’s throat. Her mouth was dry. And every single part of her body, a body that was only starting to feel like hers again and even more so when he was near, lit up immediately.

Like she was nothing but a pile of Christmas lights, jumping too soon into the season.

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