Page 63 of Christmas Is All Around
“Not immediately,” Eloise clarified, “but while we were talking in the car, I kept thinking you looked familiar, and when you mentioned your art, I looked you up, and worked it out.”
“And you didn’t say anything?” Nothing about this made sense to Charlotte—she couldn’t figure out what Eloise was building up to here.
“Well, if you didn’t want to admit to it, when I mentioned the film, I thought it would be sort of rude to bring it up,” Eloise said, which seemed reasonable enough, but she wasn’t done yet. “But once I’d mentioned the idea for the commission, I started thinking… that if we could… befriend you, I suppose? Then maybe you’d be willing to do something related to the film, for us.”
“Like,” Charlotte said, a sinking feeling in her stomach, “letting you use me to publicize this film screening?”
Eloise pressed her lips together. “It might have crossed my mind.”
“Right,” Charlotte said, her mind already working in overdrive, thinking back on every conversation she’d had with Graham aboutChristmas, Truly—about Eden Priory—about… everything.
“But,” she said slowly, “this wasmyidea. I had to convince Graham.”
Eloise nodded, relief flooding her face. “I know! He wouldn’t do it—he said that our arrangement with you for the commission would be it, and that we weren’t going to ask you to do anything else for us—I wasn’t even supposed to ever mentionChristmas, Trulyaround you.”
This was, admittedly, somewhat reassuring—she would have felt pretty freaked out if Graham had somehow manipulated her into offering to do something he’d been angling for all the while, but… why didn’t shefeelthat reassured?
“When I finally told him aboutChristmas, Truly,” she said, still trying to work out the sequence of events in her mind, “he already knew?”
The relief slowly faded from Eloise’s expression now, as if she was belatedly realizing that this confession might not be as straightforward awe’ll laugh about it latersort of thing as she’d expected.
“Um,” Eloise said. “I reckon so. He didn’t recognize you himself! I had to tell him!”
Of course he hadn’t—he’d never seen the movie. There was, Charlotte admitted to herself now, a small part of herself that had been attracted to him specifically because of this fact. After the couple of weeks she’d had before meeting him, there was something deeply relaxing about being around someone who knew absolutely nothing aboutChristmas, Truly, and couldn’t have cared less that she once had worn round glasses and lisped charmingly and been, briefly, adored by millions of people.
Except, as it turned out, that wasn’t true. Not entirely, at least.
“My point was that I’m so glad Graham didn’t listen to me,” Eloise said now, stumbling over her own words in her rush to get them out. “I’m so happy about the two of you—heseems so happy—and I’m so glad I didn’t manage to mess it all up!” She looked, suddenly, incredibly anxious—which seemed about right, Charlotte thought darkly. She would look anxious, too, if she was gripped with the dawning realization that she’d just massively fucked up her sibling’s love life.
At that exact moment, Mrs. Calloway returned with the empty tea trolley. “Shall we send out a round of hot chocolate?” she asked brightly, oblivious to the tension that filled the kitchen. She hummed “Jingle Bells” to herself as she began moving the full cups from the counter to the trolley; Charlotte began to help her, carefully avoiding Eloise’s eyes as she worked.
The conversation she needed to have with Graham—the argument that was brewing, the anger burning beneath her skin—would have to wait.
But not for long.
By six, the house was empty again, nothing but popcorn kernels and a few sticky hot chocolate spills remaining.
Charlotte was helping Mrs. Calloway break down folding chairs, lining them up against a wall to be collected in a few days by the company they’d been rented from, when Graham approached. “Let me give you a lift to the train station—your ticket is for six thirty, right?”
“Right.” Charlotte straightened, brushing her hands against her skirt (black; she’d paired it with a black turtleneck, because there was absolutely no chance she was wearing anything remotely Christmassy to a screening ofChristmas, Truly; she had to draw the line somewhere). She had managed to avoid Graham for the entirety of the event; once she’d helped Mrs. Calloway deliver the hot chocolate to the refreshment stand, she’d found herself swept into a number of interactions with enthusiastic-but-basically-benign strangers, who wanted a selfie with Tallulah, or to ask her what filming the movie had been like, or to ask if she’d visited any of the other filming locations. And, yeah, a few people asked her about the reboot—a line of inquiry that she politely but firmly shut down each time—but she could sense that the collective cultural attention had moved on.
And, honestly, the whole thing had beenfine. It was a few hours out of her life, it involved cringe-watching her own (in her opinion, somewhat questionable) child acting, but the room was packed, everyone seemed happy, and she knew the ticket sales would be a huge boon to Eden Priory.
It should have felt like some sort of record-scratch moment—an afternoon during which she made her peace with theChristmas, Trulything, once and for all—but after that conversation with Eloise in the kitchen, she’d barely been able to focus on anything happening around her. She’d tucked herself away in a corner, once themovie had started, in a spot where it would have been impossible for Graham to reach her without disturbing about twenty other people in the process, and so she’d seen him vanish into the kitchen instead, presumably to help his mom with cleanup.
But now, there was no avoiding the conversation they needed to have.
She managed to make it through the leave-taking while behaving more or less normally—perhaps her one childhood foray into acting had been worthwhile after all?—and it was only when they were in Graham’s car, headed to the train station in the village, that he at last seemed to realize something was wrong. To his credit, it was only about fifteen seconds into the drive—enough time for Charlotte to offer one monosyllabic reply, and for him to catch a proper look at her expression—that he caught on.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, wariness writ plain in his voice.
“Did you cozy up to me to use me to promote Eden Priory?” she asked, not mincing words. She’d never been one to beat around the bush, even under the best of circumstances, and she was not exactly in a diplomatic frame of mind at the moment.
To Graham’s credit, he didn’t lie. There were plenty of men she’d dated in the past that she knew would have offered some sort of excuse at this point, tried to weasel their way out of trouble. Graham, however, simply let a long, painful beat of silence elapse before he reached over to switch off the radio.
“Did Eloise tell you that?” he asked at last, his voice quiet.
“She did,” she responded, equally quiet, trying not to let any of the hurt gnawing at her chest creep into her voice. If Graham had just explained, early on, what had happened, she could have forgiven him—probably would have found it funny, in fact. But this deliberate, ongoing deceit? She had a much harder time swallowing that.
