7

“Well, that won’t do.”

Darcy heard her aunt’s sweet voice with a tinge of her Southern Ohio roots on the edges. Her heart warmed at the force and reckoning floating on her words. Lulu might be injured but she was always in charge.

“Lu, you know we don’t have a choice.” Finn? Why was Finn Tarrington, Mr. Hotty Stray with her aunt?

Trying to enter the room undetected, she slid behind the multi-colored curtain and set the shopping bag on the floor. The bag was stuffed with what Darcy considered the essentials for any hospital stay: bottled water, a variety of salty and sweet snacks, the most recent editions of every grocery store gossip magazine, and a Sudoku puzzle book. Just the bare necessities.

“You cannot disappoint the children, Finnegan. I won’t stand for it.”

Finnegan Tarrington? Were his parents trying to get him beat up as a kid?

“You can’t stand, Lulu. That is my point.”

“We’ll just have to find a replacement. I’m sure someone would love to help you. Maybe Darcy?”

At the sound of her name, Darcy choked on air.

“Darcy, darling, why don’t you come out from behind the not very concealing curtain where you’re eavesdropping and tell worry-wort Finn you’ll fill in for me as director of the Christmas program?”

The curtain’s metal hooks clinked against each other with her slow tug, revealing herself, and her face warming by the second. Darcy locked her gaze with Lulu’s twinkling, golden eyes. She was sunk. “Aunt Lulu what do I know about directing a Christmas program?”

“You were in them as a child. You even wrote one for your junior English project, if my feeble mind remembers correctly.”

Her mind was anything but feeble. Darcy had written a Christmas program—complete with stage direction, musical anthems, and a talking donkey. Every Christmas program should have a talking donkey. Of course, she wrote the play when she was seventeen years old, longed to be a playwright, and Andrew Lloyd Weber was her idol. At the start of her junior year her mother had finally agreed to stay in the same city through high school graduation, a dream she never knew she had. She wrote the Christmas play with hope. The Christmas program was the last thing Darcy ever wrote.

Shortly after the start of the second semester, her mom declared she was “in love for real this time” with a Romantics Language professor she met at a conference in Detroit. Within days, Darcy, Bennett, and their mom hitched a trailer, stacked with their meager belongings, in the back of their decade old SUV and headed to live with the new love of Mom’s life.

The love lasted four months, but Mom found her footing at the local university and her wanderlust seemed to be quenched.

Darcy’s love for writing was destroyed. She turned to the safety and predictability of science. Nothing good ever came from romance and art.

“Auntie, that was a long time ago. I haven’t written in years.” Give or take a decade and a half, but who was counting. “I’m not sure I’d be the best person to help.”

“Of course, you are. Theatre is in your blood. You know I was quite the thespian back in my day? And you definitely had the bug. Once bitten…”

“Still, that doesn’t qualify me to direct a Christmas program with kids.” She twisted to Finn. With the sight of his messy dark hair and broad shoulders, she sucked in a deep breath, wishing she could sneak one of the water bottles. Her cheeks burned with what she was quite certain was a shade somewhere between hot pink cotton candy and fall beets. Where was a fan when a girl needed one? “They are kids, right?”

“Church programs kind of mandate children,” Finn said.

She shook her head. “There must be someone else who could help.” She was terrible with children. They were sticky and followed their emotions. They were not mice. She preferred mice.

Finn released a sigh. “The Christmas program was a hard sell. Lulu was adamant with the leadership council that the church needed to produce the program this year. But with the fiftieth anniversary of the festival the folks at church have been spread pretty thin. The pageant prep has pretty much been the two of us.”

“Can you believe the church hasn’t had a Christmas program in five years?” Lulu asked.

“That’s hard to imagine.” But in Darcy’s estimation most church Christmas programs were mediocre at best, particularly in a small town where the talent pool was likely a bit shallow.

“I told Pastor Tom we had to have a program this year, what with the big anniversary of the Christmas Festival. The program will be the crowning jewel in the town’s celebration. Isn’t that exciting, Darcy darling?”

Two Darcy darling’s in one conversation. It was official. Darcy would be directing the Christmas program.