Chapter 21: A Reindeer's Joy
The fire in the great hearth had burned down to a deep bed of crimson coals, hissing softly. The living room was a landscape of shadows and warm, pulsing light. Nicholas stood in the middle of it, still in his heavy boots, feeling strangely untethered. The confrontation under the aurora played on a loop behind his eyes. Clara’s laughter. The final, metallic plink of the ring vanishing into the snow. It hadn’t been anger he’d seen in her face. It had been… relief. A mirror of his own.
He turned and left the room, his footsteps unnaturally loud in the quiet corridor. He didn’t go to his study. He went to the small, unassuming door at the end of the west wing, the one that felt more like home than the master suite ever had.
He didn’t knock. He pushed it open, the simple wooden frame seeming to strain to contain the sudden bulk of him filling the doorway.
Mimi was curled on the window seat, a book open in her lap, silhouetted against the night. She looked up, her eyes wide in the soft lamplight.
“Nick? What’s wrong?” She began to uncurl, a hand going instinctively to the pronounced swell of her stomach.
He crossed the room in three long strides, the floorboards creaking. He didn’t speak. Instead, he sank to his knees before her, a giant brought low. The wool of his trousers whispered against the rug. He reached for her hands, her small, cool fingers disappearing into his own broad, calloused palms. He was trembling.
“She said yes,” he breathed, the words rushing out. “Clara. She agreed. To everything.” He looked up at her, his usual jovial mask completely gone, replaced by a raw, vulnerable hope. “The divorce. All of it.”
Mimi’s breath caught. She’d known he was going to ask, had lain awake nights worrying about the fallout, the drama, the potential for a seismic crack in the Pole’s carefully maintained fantasy. She’d braced for tears, for shouting, for a cold war fought with china and paperwork.
She hadn’t braced for this. For him kneeling before her, shaking like a leaf.
“Just like that?” she whispered.
“Just like that.” A disbelieving laugh choked out of him. “She laughed, Mimi. She actually laughed. Dropped her ring in the snow and said… she said, ‘About damn time.’” He repeated the phrase as if trying to decode it, his thumbs stroking the backs of her hands. “She was already walking away before I could even… she was heading for the stables.”
Understanding dawned on Mimi’s face, softening her features. “Elias.”
“Elias,” Nicholas echoed, nodding. The final piece clicked into place, a puzzle he hadn’t even known he was solving. His obliviousness, once a comfortable cloak, now felt like a profound, quiet shame. “She wasn’t waiting for me. She was waiting for me to set her free.”
He leaned forward then, resting his forehead gently against her belly. The heavy wool of his coat brushed her knees. Through the soft fabric of her dress, he felt the firm curve of her, the life they’d made. A profound shudder went through him.
“I’ve been so stupid,” he murmured, his voice muffled. “So wrapped up in the lists, the logistics, the eternal work of it all. I thought providing the world was enough. I thought the… arrangement… was enough for her, too.” He lifted his head, his eyes glistening in the firelight. “I didn’t see her. Not really. Not like I see you.”
Mimi pulled one hand free and cupped his cheek. Her touch was an anchor. “She’s stronger than anyone gives her credit for.”
“I know that now.” He turned his face into her palm, pressing a kiss there. Then his hands came up, resting with infinite care on the slope of her stomach. “This is real. You are real. This feeling… it’s not just excitement. It’s necessity. You said that word once. It felt like a life raft.”
She smiled, a small, private thing. “I know.”
He stayed there for a long moment, kneeling, his large hands spanning the future. The baby kicked, a strong, rolling movement. Nicholas’s breath hitched. “There,” he whispered, awe stripping his voice bare. “Right there.”
He looked up at her, all the grandiose cheer stripped away, leaving just a man in his late fifties, terrified and hopeful. “Marry me. The second the ink is dry. No elf ceremony, no spectacle. Just you and me. And him.” He patted her stomach gently. “Let me do this right. Let me build a life that fits in a single room, not a whole damn hemisphere.”
Mimi slid off the window seat, joining him on the rug. She fit herself into the space between his knees, wrapping her arms around his neck. She smelled of soap and the faint, sweet scent of the ginger tea she drank to settle her stomach. “Yes,” she said simply, against his ear. “But we tell Elias and Clara first. Together. No more secrets in corners.”
He nodded, holding her tightly, his face buried in her hair. The weight of the centuries, of the endless expectation, seemed to lift from his shoulders. The only list that mattered now was in this room: her, the child, the simple promise of a morning that belonged to them.
Later, they lay in her narrow bed, her back fitted against his chest, his hand splayed over her stomach. The fire was embers, the clock ticked in the hall.
“She really didn’t mind?” Mimi asked sleepily.
Nicholas was quiet, remembering the absolute lack of hesitation in Clara’s eyes. “I don’t think she minded years ago,” he said, the truth finally clear. “I was just too busy to notice.”
Mimi intertwined her fingers with his where they rested on her skin. “So we’re all free, then.”
Outside, a light snow began to fall, blanketing the tracks leading from the garden to the stables, smoothing over the last evidence of the old world. Inside, wrapped in warmth and a new, fragile peace, Nicholas closed his eyes. For the first time in memory, he wasn’t thinking about tomorrow’s production quotas or the state of the naughty list. He was thinking about names. About cribs. About the terrifying, wonderful quiet of a life that was finally, entirely, his own.