NORMALLY WHEN MY PART OF the story was done, I waited in the Go Room with everybody else at the company to see how the rest of the night played out. So I would have been there to watch Dave escort Ethan to see his Bob Cratchit, and apparently a homeless guy on Sixth Avenue.
But I didn’t see any of that. The minute I crossed back into the Time Tunnel and then back to the present, I ran down the hall to my dressing room. Because I didn’t want anyone to notice me bawling my eyes out. That would be considered weird.
My dressing room was empty, thankfully—part of me had been half expecting to find Stephanie in there—so I locked the door and struggled out of my costume, which was no easy task all by myself.
There was a shower in the dressing room bathroom. I only ever used it once a year, and sometimes not even that often, because sometimes I was in such a hurry to get out of the office after Christmas that I just cold creamed my face and went home. But that night—Ethan’s night—I took a five-minute shower so I could just cry into the spray of the water. When I got out I did a quick blow-dry and slapped on a regular amount of makeup—so I’d look a little better when I went back out there.
When I got back to the Go Room, Ethan was delivering this touching little speech to Dave on the subject of the homeless:
“Hey, if he’s homeless, he should start by getting a job. It’s that easy—you work, they pay you, you pay for someplace to live. But this guy doesn’t want to work, does he? No. He wants to sit here, and if he sits here long enough, somebody will pay for his next bottle of vodka.”
Apparently seeing the Dents and how bad the kid really had it at home hadn’t softened Ethan’s heart much. He seemed as cool and collected and merciless as ever. Worse off than when I’d left him. Usually, by this point, the Scrooge was starting to soften. To see things differently. To let go of his anger. So Boz was probably a little worried.
I was worried, too, so much I felt sick with it. I’d done my best with the past. I’d tried to show Ethan things that would be meaningful. I’d tried to help him believe, and he’d seemed to; at least for part of it, he’d seemed to. But what if that hadn’t been enough?
Dave wasn’t giving up on him, though.
“This man is not a drunk,” he informed Ethan as they stood before the homeless guy on Sixth Avenue, who couldn’t see them, of course, but was mumbling like he knew someone was there. “He is simply a man who’s been unlucky in life. Once, this man played the saxophone for one of the most sought-after jazz bands in New York City. He had a beautiful wife and a daughter, and he was more than willing to work, and work hard, every day. But then he was injured while fixing a leak in his roof. After that, there was a series of small misfortunes, one after another, all leading him to this place.”
“And how do you know all this?” Ethan asked.
“I can see what’s inside him,” Dave answered mysteriously. “Right now, what he feels most is cold. Then, hungry. He lost touch with his family—his wife died, and his daughter doesn’t even know where to find him. Miranda is his daughter’s name. She works at the front desk of the London NYC Hotel just a few blocks from here. She’s probably even seen him in passing, but she doesn’t really look at him. Nobody really looks at him.”
Ethan was looking at him, though. The man was sitting in a sleeping bag and a tangle of raggedy blankets against the side of a building where there was construction going on. He was wearing layers and layers of mismatched clothes: a shirt and a sweatshirt and a coat with a broken zipper, three scarves of different patterns wound around his neck, a faded floppy black hat mashed on top of his strings of shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair, and a pair of cheap sunglasses.
“If someone would inform his daughter of his whereabouts,” Dave continued, “his life would change again. All it would take is a few sentences, and perhaps a pair of warm gloves, to save this man.”
Ethan glanced off down the street. “What does this have to do with me? Why are you going through so much effort to show me this one homeless man when there must be ten more just like him in a one-mile radius from here? What, you want me to buy him some gloves?”
“You have a connection with this man,” Dave said. “Don’t you recognize him?”
“No.” Ethan scoffed. “No, I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen him before.”
“Not in person, I think, but he was on the news several years ago—a witness to a terrible accident that happened not far from here. Later he even testified in court.”
I could tell when Ethan understood what the connection was because his face went carefully blank. “So this is the saxophone player.”
Dave nodded.
“The one my father gave money to that day.”
“Yes.”
“You think that’s going to make me want to help him? If my dad hadn’t stopped to listen to this guy, he’d still be alive,” Ethan said bitterly.
“That’s true.” Dave gazed down at the man tenderly. “And it was this man who saw what happened and tried to help him. Your father died in this man’s arms.”
Ethan took a step back and looked around, like he was deciding to take off and just needed to figure out where to go. “Get me out of here,” he said sharply. “I’ve had enough of this. Please.”
I thought the please was a nice touch.
“Okay, prepping the tunnel to move them to the party,” said the operator from the control booth. It wasn’t Grant anymore—someone from Dave’s team had taken over his post. He and Marty had taken up their places in the Go Room and were undoubtedly about to start taking bets on whether or not Ethan would fail. My stomach churned at the thought.
Boz was right, I thought. We shouldn’t bet on them.
The fog and snow machines whirred on. In less than a minute Dave and Ethan came through and the cameras shifted to the party scene—a brownstone apartment in the Bronx. Inside, all the lights were on, and we could hear voices and music—Christmas carols, of course.
“O come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant . . .”
“This is my mom’s place,” Ethan said. I’d never seen him look so out of it—the thing with the homeless man had really gotten to him.
“Yes. Shall we?” Dave gestured up the small set of stairs toward the front door.
“Whatever,” Ethan said.
It wasn’t a big party—about a dozen people or so—but they were all having a great time, from the sound of it. As Dave and Ethan went into the apartment, they could hear someone laughing. It was one of the best laughs I’d ever heard—full and warm and brimming with delight. It just made you feel good, hearing that laugh.
I recognized it. I looked at Ethan to see his reaction.
He stopped when he heard it. “That’s my mom,” he said. “She always had this contagious laugh.”
He was right about it being contagious. Soon everybody was laughing. Dave and Ethan moved forward toward the sound until they came into a sitting room, which was decorated beautifully for Christmas, with a huge silver tree in front of the window and strands of holly and candles along the fireplace and end tables. Against one wall was a huge, comfortable-looking sofa with several people sitting on it, posing as a man took their picture with a bunch of phones.
“Say cheese, everyone,” he said.
At one end of the sofa, Ethan’s mother sat wearing a black velvet dress that looked amazing on her. Next to her was a tall red-haired man who I assumed must be the new husband. On his knee sat a little redheaded girl in a green dress—Ethan’s half sister. Then an older woman, Ethan’s grandmother from his mother’s side, who was holding a tiny new baby. Then a young man in his twenties who I’d never seen in any of Ethan’s memories. And at the farthest end was Jack—her hair a regular glossy brown again.
“Squeeze together a little,” said the man taking the pictures, and they did, which made Ethan’s mom laugh again, which made them all laugh. “That’s a great one,” the man said, snapping off a series of pictures. “That’s the whole family, isn’t it? It could be next year’s Christmas card.”
“Not the whole family,” Jack said, taking the hand of the man sitting next to her. “We’re still missing one. My brother.”
“I did invite him,” Ethan’s grandmother said. “He told me, and I quote, that ‘Christmas parties are the lamest of all parties.’ And Christmas, he said, was just a stupid excuse to rip people off.”
“Sounds like Ethan,” Jack said. “He believes it, too. That’s what’s sad. He’s a regular Ebenezer Scrooge.”
Everyone in the Go Room burst into a nervous kind of laughter.
Ethan looked out the window, like he was bored and just waiting for the opportunity to duck out.
“Oh, he’s not that bad,” said the old woman—the grandmother. “He used to be such a sweet boy.”
“Used to be,” muttered Jack.
“He took your father’s death hard, that’s all,” said Ethan’s mom. “It messed us all up, didn’t it?” She gave Jack a meaningful glance that said I know all about what you did during that stage.
Jack shrugged. “I guess. But Ethan doesn’t show signs of snapping out of it anytime soon.”
“Where does she get off judging me?” Ethan said under his breath. “Like she’s a saint.”
“There are two ways to respond when life hands you something unpleasant,” the grandmother said, smiling down at the infant in her lap. “You can get soft or you can get tough. Our Ethan has just decided to get tough, it seems. But he’ll come around eventually, I think. He’s got a good heart under there somewhere. And he has time—God knows, he’s, what, seventeen now? He has time to get himself on the right path again.”
She was wrong, of course.
“Which is why I will continue to invite him to this ‘lame’ Christmas party every year,” his grandmother said. She was so the Fred in this situation.
“And why I will keep calling him every week,” added his mother. “Even though he doesn’t want to talk to me. Oh, and that reminds me. You know what?” Her smile was full of mischief, like she was about to spill the best secret ever. “He told me he has a girlfriend now.”
Uh-oh.
“Poor girl!” exclaimed Jack. “Who is it? Tell me it’s not a Manhattan socialite with an IQ the same size as her waist measurement.”
“Her name . . .” His mom paused dramatically. “ . . . is Victoria Scott.”
“That’s a socialite’s name if I ever heard one,” Jack said.
Ethan’s mom reached over and pretended to smack Jack on the back of the head. “He didn’t talk about her that way. He called her Tori. He said that she likes to meet in all these obscure places around the city, like the left lion of the New York Public Library—you know the lions? She’s a free spirit, apparently.”
“Well, perhaps that’s just what Ethan needs at this juncture,” said Grandma. “A free spirit.”
The irony was kind of killing me. I was a spirit, sure, but not exactly free.
“But what kind of name is Tori, seriously?” said Jack.
“Like Jack’s such a ladylike name,” said Ethan. I smiled. My hero, coming to my defense, even if his sister couldn’t hear him.
“Tell me about this Victoria Scott,” Dave said suddenly. “I’d like to know more about her.”
UH-OH.
“What, you don’t already know everything there is to know about me?” Ethan gave him a sarcastic smirk. “You can see inside me, right? Wasn’t the ghost wearing her face?”
I was dead. Done for. Doomed. This was it.
“Her face,” Dave repeated. “What do you—”
Thankfully they were interrupted by everyone being called to some kind of charades-like game in the other room, which was something straight out of A Christmas Carol, too, much to everyone in the Go Room’s delight. Ethan went over to watch, and Dave trailed behind him, his question unasked for the moment.
Ethan’s mom was up first. She turned to Ethan’s stepdad. She lifted her head regally, obviously pretending to be someone else. “I’m like a cat here, a no-named slob,” she said in a higher voice than usual. “We belong to nobody, and nobody belongs to us. We don’t even belong to each other.”
“Holly Golightly. From Breakfast at Tiffany’s!” the stepdad said immediately.
Jack’s jaw dropped. “That was so . . . how did you even get that?”
“We have a psychic connection,” his mom said, kissing the stepdad on the cheek. “Your turn, Jackie O.”
“We’ll see who has a psychic connection,” Jack said.
And so they played for a while, back and forth, one team (made up of the little girl, whose name was Grace, and Ethan’s mom and her husband, whose name was apparently Richard) against the other (Jack, Mason—Jack’s fiancé, and Evelyn, the grandmother), with Ethan’s mom’s team the clear winner. I didn’t fully understand the rules of the game, but it was something like Who Am I? They went through a bunch of funny characters, impersonating the person if they could, using well-known lines or sayings. In the next twenty or so minutes they went through George Washington, Katy Perry, Elmo, George W. Bush, Michael Jackson, Kerry Washington, and Harry Potter. We all kind of got into it, even Ethan, who shouted out some guesses even though nobody could hear them.
Then Jack took a slip of paper out of the hat where they’d all put in a clue and read it. Her turn again.
“Grace!” she exclaimed. “Did you write this?”
The little girl giggled. “Daddy helped me write it.”
“Okay. Well. This is one I should be able to do.” She folded the paper back up and put it aside. Then she stood up and stared coldly at the group. “This party is so lame,” she said in a low, boylike monotone. “Christmas parties are the lamest kind of party. I like money. Do any of you have lots of money? Well, then, you’re not worth my time.”
It was quiet for a minute. Everyone knew the answer.
“It’s Ethan.” Jack’s fiancé scratched the back of his neck. “I mean, I haven’t met him, but we were just talking about him. Mr. Scrooge,” he said with an uncomfortable laugh.
Everyone in the Go Room giggled.
“Yes, that’s my brother.” Jack tried to smile. “He just does what he wants, and the rest of us can go to hell.”
I glanced at Ethan. He was looking intently at the floor now, like he was counting the fibers in the carpet. We all waited to see how he’d react. With Scrooges it was generally about fifty-fifty at this point. Half of them were seriously seeing the error of their ways. And half needed Blackpool to give them that extra little push.
“Shall we go?” Dave asked Ethan quietly.
Ethan looked up. I could tell immediately that something had changed in him, and not for the good. Something like what had happened with me on my night as the Scrooge. He’d taken a turn.
“Sure,” he said sardonically. “Why not? I can’t wait to see your next setup.”
“Our setup.”
“This is a scam,” Ethan said. “This isn’t about my character. It’s about my money. Right?”
“No,” Dave said firmly. “This is about your soul.”
Ethan laughed. “My soul. Right. My precious soul.”
“It is precious.”
Ethan sighed. “If I just write you a check, can we be done now? Honestly, I would pay a lot if you’d just return me to my home. I won’t even press charges.”
“This isn’t about money,” Dave said.
“It’s always about money.” Ethan held a hand up as if to say Just give me a number. “No? Okay, then, let’s go. Before the flowers in your beard wilt. Seriously, dude. Who puts flowers in their beard?”
I could tell by the look in his eyes that we’d officially lost him. Ethan didn’t believe anymore. The same way that I hadn’t believed.
He’d decided that he wasn’t going to play along. Which meant that he wouldn’t repent. He wouldn’t be saved. He’d die.
I didn’t know what to do. I could only stand there in the Go Room helplessly as it all played out, watching and waiting like everyone else. Some people even had popcorn. Like this was a freak show, and Ethan was the freak.
Stephanie popped up at my elbow. “There you are, Holly. I’ve been looking for you. Your performance was inspiring, by the way. I think you really made an impression on him.” She lowered her voice. “And I’m sure that one-on-one time you spent with him made a big difference, too.”
It had made a big difference. Maybe it had made all the difference. I swallowed.
“So,” I said numbly, “has it been everything you thought it would be?”
She looked at me blankly.
“This. Christmas.” I pointed to the monitors, where Ethan and Blackpool were standing over the homeless man on Sixth, who was lying there completely still, his face a pale blue. Blackpool was the towering phantom now, faceless and silent. I shivered and tried to focus on something other than the memory of my body going numb, limb by limb. “It’s your first time seeing it all play out in real life—A Christmas Carol, American version 173. Is it, like, blowing your mind?”
“Oh. Yes. It’s changing the world,” she said, but for once she didn’t sound that stoked about it. “Hey, can we go to your office for a few minutes? I want to talk to you about something.”
I sighed. “Look, Steph, if this is about you researching me, I told you, I’m over it. It’s fine. Don’t make a big deal out of it.”
I meant it, I realized. I wasn’t mad anymore. I couldn’t feel anything in the moment. I was so done.
“I got you some Chinese takeout,” she added. “I thought you’d be hungry after your big performance. Do you like egg rolls?”
I happened to love egg rolls.
Part of me wanted to stay and watch Ethan, but a bigger part of me wanted to run far, far away now. I knew that Blackpool was going to last at least another hour—he had to take him to Danny Denton’s still—the Cratchits’—and there was a scene at the school where the boys there cleaned out Ethan’s locker and stole his stuff. Then, according to the itinerary, Blackpool would take him to the mortuary.
I didn’t know if I could stand to watch the mortuary scene.
So Stephanie and I went back to my office, and found it all laid out on my desk: little white containers of fried rice and chow mein and sweet and sour chicken, and oh yes, egg rolls.
Stephanie got out a couple of paper plates from a drawer in my desk, but then I found I couldn’t eat anything.
“Are you okay?” Stephanie asked. “I’ve never known you to pass up egg rolls.”
“He’s going to fail,” I said miserably.
Weirdly, she didn’t seem surprised by my assessment. “He might.”
“He’s already decided.” I bit my lip. “I know him.”
“It will work out the way it’s supposed to.”
“Stop saying that!” I burst out. “No, it won’t!”
“It will,” she argued. “Besides, if he fails, he’ll just end up working here, right? Like you. That’s not so bad, is it?”
She wasn’t making any sense. “What?”
“If Ethan fails, he’ll die. This morning?”
This morning. Six fifty-six a.m., on Broadway. God, it was only hours away. I needed to sit down. I sank into my chair.
“And then he’ll wake up here just like you did,” Stephanie said. “And he’ll be the new Ghost of Christmas Present.”
My mouth opened. For a few seconds I just stared at her. “The Ghost of Christmas Present,” I repeated stupidly.
“Da—Copperfield’s replacement.” She sighed. “I think the company actually knows Ethan’s going to fail. Blackpool does, I’m pretty sure—all that stuff about Ethan’s hazy future. His future is probably not that hazy. It’s just that it would be so discouraging, you know, if he came out and told everyone that Ethan was going to fail.”
“The Ghost of Christmas Present,” I whispered again.
“Yes.” Stephanie gave me a little smile. “So it would be okay, you see?”
I immediately tried to picture Ethan as the Ghost of Christmas Present. If he let his hair grow out and grew a beard . . . and then I remembered that as well-preserved zombies, our hair doesn’t grow. But hey, that’s what wigs and fake mustaches are for, right? We had a stellar costume department. And Ethan was tall. Not like Dave, not Jolly Green Giant tall, but still. Tall enough.
He’d make a great Ghost, I decided.
The idea was so great, so amazing, so incredibly awesome that I got up and started to pace around my office. If Ethan failed, then the company could give him his own crappy apartment, his non-smart phone, his pitiful hundred bucks a month, and he’d spend some time being super mad about it—I remembered those days, how furious I was underneath everything, like a pot about to boil over. But then he’d start to accept it, like I did. He’d be fine. We actually could be together.
I was smiling now. I couldn’t believe I’d never thought of it before. Ethan was going to be the Ghost of Christmas Present. It was like a dream come true.
Then I began to picture other things, too, like Ethan and me in our Hoodies walking down the streets of NYC together. Making jokes about the losers we worked with. Holding hands. Kissing. I’d have some explaining to do, sure, about the whole Victoria Scott thing. But eventually he’d understand, wouldn’t he?
We’d have a future. Something that lasted past Christmas. Maybe even forever.
“How do you . . .” I couldn’t catch my breath. “How do you know for sure he’ll become Dave’s replacement?” I was thinking about what Boz had said all those months ago, about how a Ghost seems to become mysteriously available at just the moment one is needed.
“He told me,” Stephanie said.
“He?”
“Copperfield.”
And then I suddenly remembered Dave’s vision of hugging Stephanie. Kissing her head. I shuddered. “Ew, that’s not right. I’m sorry, but . . . ew.”
“Ew?” Now it was Stephanie’s turn to be confused.
“You and Dave together. And you still call him Copperfield? Weird. So weird. And I thought you were with Grant now. Grant’s awesome. And Dave’s, like, old enough to be your father.”
Her eyes widened, and she covered her mouth with her hand. At first I thought she was crying, and I felt bad. I mean, age is just a number, right? Who was I to judge? But then I realized she was laughing.
“Wow,” she said after a minute. “You always end up surprising me, Holly.” She laughed again, then took off her glasses and wiped at her eyes. “Dave is old enough to be my father.”
I threw my hands up. “Ew!”
“He’s not only old enough to be my father. He is my father.” She set her glasses on my desk.
“What!”
“He’s my dad.” She took a breath and let it out. “Wow, it feels good to get that off my chest. Sometimes this year I felt like I was going to explode. And why not tell you tonight? You’re done with your Christmas Past stuff. It’s the last night of my internship.” She said the word internship like it was a code word for something else. “It’s a night for revelations.”
“What?” I felt like this was the only word I was saying in our entire conversation.
“You’re not the only one with secrets, Holly. I’ve got a few. Big ones.”
Obviously.
“Secrets?” I was sure I didn’t know what she was talking about, me having secrets. But suddenly I got the feeling that she knew things about me beyond what she’d read in my file. “Like what?”
I couldn’t imagine what else there could possibly be.
“Like I’m not actually majoring in psychology.” She closed her eyes for a minute and then rushed on, like she wanted to get this out before she lost her nerve. “I really do feel like I’m your friend. You’ve got to believe me, Holly. I always felt like we were going to be friends someday, even when—gosh, this is so much harder than I thought it would be. My dad, he thinks I should wait until it’s all over and then write you a letter or something, but I think we deserve more than that, right? Because we’re friends. We might be the weirdest friends ever, but we’re friends.”
“You’re not a psychology major?” I was still stuck on this.
She acted like she hadn’t heard me. “But that’s what’s so great about it, because before, you couldn’t be anybody’s friend, not really. You weren’t capable of it—you were so self-involved. But that’s changed. It took a while, but now you’ve learned how to think about other people. You know how to be a friend now. Not a great friend yet, but you’re getting there.”
I was so lost I needed a map for this conversation.
She sighed. “Sorry, I’m not making sense.”
“No,” I said. “You’re totally not.”
“Okay. Let me just get it out.” She plunked down in the chair across from my desk. She took a deep breath and released it, then leaned forward so we were looking into each other’s eyes. “I’m the Ghost of Christmas Past.”
My heart started to pound. It was exactly what I’d always been afraid of, the minute that this girl had walked in the door at Project Scrooge—that she’d been brought in to replace me.
“Okay, whoa there. Calm down.” Stephanie reached across the desk and grabbed my hand as I started to hyperventilate right there and then. “It’s okay, Holly. Trust me.”
“How can you even say that?” I gasped. “What’s going to happen to me? Where will I go?”
Her eyebrows lifted. “Wait. You think . . . No. No, Holly. You’ve got it all wrong. I’m not going to replace you.” She smiled tentatively. “You replaced me.”
I stared at her. “Huh?”
“I was your Ghost of Christmas Past. Six years ago. I’m not surprised you never recognized me. I was almost fourteen, but Leigh and Marie tried to make me look like I was even younger. They had this vision of the Lamp as a little girl.” Her big blue eyes were full of amusement and concern.
I was shaking my head, I realized. It was too much.
She frowned, and her eyebrow bumps appeared. “Holly? Say something.”
“How? Why?” Oh good, I thought dazedly. I’d moved on to other one-word questions.
“My dad was a Bob Cratchit once, a single parent just trying to make ends meet, and I was the Tiny Tim. It’s a long story, but essentially the Scrooge that year failed to be rehabilitated, and my dad died later in an accident, and Boz felt so bad that he brought us both here afterward, where they gave us the option of working for the company instead of my dad moving on. So then my dad became the Ghost of Christmas Present, and I became the Ghost of Christmas Past. As an interim, of course. The real Ghosts have to be dead, and I’m alive.”
“But—” My head was spinning. “But you said you were almost fourteen when—”
“I was eleven, actually, when I started working here. Almost ten years ago.”
“You’ve been working for Project Scrooge for ten years?”
“I’ve been on a leave of absence, so to speak, for the last six,” she explained. “But, yes, I worked here before. That’s part of why my dad and I decided to take this job. Because then I would get to spend time with him while I was growing up. I got to live with him. I wouldn’t have to lose him or go into foster care. Anyway, as you know, this is my dad’s last year, so I came back to help him out. I wanted to spend more time with him before . . .” Tears popped up in her eyes. “Okay, it’s pretty emotional, finally losing my dad after all this time, but it’s the right thing. Being a Ghost is not being alive. It’s like being a shadow. You’re not fully part of the world. It’s time for him to move on and join my mom.”
“Does Grant know?” I blurted out. “Does Marty?”
She blushed. “I told Grant a couple weeks ago. He was pretty shocked. He and Marty didn’t have a clue about me being the Lamp before. Like you, they thought I was new here.”
I sat back, pretty shocked myself—probably more shocked than I had ever been in my whole life.
“Anyway. I’ve always wanted to tell you that I’m sorry,” Stephanie said. “For failing you, I mean. I’ve always been able to see the good inside of you, and the good you could do in the world—so much good, Holly, that you could have accomplished in your life. And you were so young—you were the youngest Scrooge we’ve ever had in Project Scrooge history. Did you know that? Not just for the American branch, either, but for the world. I was so excited to work on your case. But then I wasn’t able to save you. I couldn’t convince you that it was real. I failed. And you deserved better.” She looked down at her hands. “I’m sorry, Holly. Being the Ghost of Christmas Past is an enormous responsibility. You know that as well as I do. It takes patience, and a cool head, and quick thinking, but more than that—it takes real empathy. You have to understand deep down what the Scrooge is feeling in order to know what will affect him. Or her,” she added sheepishly. “Which is why you’re such a great GCP. You understand the Scrooges better than I ever could.”
“So you’re not a psychology major,” I said again.
She shook her head. “Too much reading.”
“Do you even go to NYU? Is your name really Stephanie? Was any part of this real?”
“All of that’s true,” she said quickly. “I do go to NYU—I’m going to graduate in two years, if all goes according to plan. I’m a theater major, actually. I have this dream about being on Broadway one day, but that might be a pretty big ambition. And yes, my name is really Stephanie. But you can call me Steph. If you can forgive me, that is.”
“Uh-huh.” I searched inside myself and found that a part of me, maybe even a big part of me, was definitely furious that she’d been stringing me along all this time, playing the wide-eyed newbie when in fact she’d been a veteran of this place. She’d totally had me fooled. But there was another part that just . . . accepted it. Steph and I were connected now, and we always would be, like we were sisters or something. We’d both worn the lamp.
I thought about that little blond-haired, blue-eyed twerp who’d taken my hand and tried to show me my life from a different perspective. She’d believed in me. And no matter how she felt like she needed to apologize, I knew the truth: I was the one who had let her down.
“Okay, I forgive you,” I said after a minute. “If you can forgive me for being such a stuck-up, horrible little brat.”
“Which time?” She grinned. “Back then or this year, when you kept sending me on all those crazy errands?”
“Shut up,” I said, smiling in spite of myself. “Both, I guess?”
“I forgive you for being a stuck-up, horrible little brat,” she said. “Both times.”
“You’re a decent actress, in my opinion,” I said. “And I’m qualified to know.”
“Wow, thanks, Miss Havisham,” she said in her squeaky voice. She laughed, and then glanced at her watch. “Holy smokes, is that the time? Grant’s waiting for me. He wants to watch the final scene together.”
“Don’t make him any bets,” I advised. “He always wins.”
“I know. Especially this year.” She held her hand out to me. “It’s been a pleasure spending time with you, Holly. I mean it. Thank you.”
I shook her hand, and she walked around the desk for a quick hug. I didn’t resist. I even hugged her back a little.
“I’ll see you in there,” she said. “Oh, and Holly? I hope everything works out with Ethan. Then you won’t have to be so alone all the time.”
I stared at her.
“A loving heart is the truest wisdom,” she murmured. Then she was gone.
I should have returned to the Go Room with her, since Boz would be expecting me at this point, but I stayed in my office for a few minutes, thinking about everything Steph had said.
Thinking about Ethan. I was still trying to get my head around the idea that him failing meant that he’d become the new Ghost of Christmas Present.
My Christmas Present.
I wanted to laugh and sing and dance around, it was such an amazing, wonderful turn of events. No wonder Blackpool had been so cranky. Because he’d known all along. He’d known I was going to get a happy ending after all. I deserved to be happy, didn’t I?
But then what about what Ethan deserves? said a little voice in the back of my mind.
I felt the elation drain out of me. I couldn’t help but think about all the things Steph had just said to me about the responsibility that came with being the GCP. Then I tried to tell myself that it didn’t matter. Everything was going to work out for Ethan—he’d get me out of the bargain, after all. And death wouldn’t be so bad as long as he had me, right?
A loving heart is the truest wisdom.
I loved him, I realized. I loved Ethan Winters. It hadn’t been just a game I was playing because I was lonely. I’d fallen in love with him. His heart had spoken to mine.
I loved him. That’s all the counted, right? That’s all he needed.
Wrong, said the voice.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. I knew it was wrong.
Like Steph had seen in me, I could see the good inside of Ethan. All of the bad habits and apathy and coldheartedness he sometimes showed came from hurt, and I knew that he could overcome that hurt, he could change, he could live his life in a different way and be happy in it, if only he had the chance.
I loved him. But if he failed, I’d be the one responsible for damning him to hell. If he failed now, I would have taken away his chance. Steph was right. Being a Ghost wasn’t really being alive. If he died today, Ethan would become a shadow. Like me.
What kind of love was that?
But even if I wanted to fix it, what could I do about it now? Now it was too late to get it all back on track. The damage was done. Ethan was playing out the final scene as I sat there with my Chinese food. I spotted the little wrapped fortune cookie on my desk. Sugar sounded good—time to eat my feelings. I unwrapped it, broke it open, and fished out the little slip of paper.
My fortune read, It’s never too late to become what one could have been.
I stood up. I grabbed my Hoodie from the hook on the back of the door and put it on.
I knew what I had to do.
Even if it was going to cost me everything.