Page 137 of Santa Daddy
The tree lot didn't smell like fear this time.
It smelled like sap and salt air from the harbor two blocks away, mixed with chocolate from the church ladies selling cookies at a folding table. Kids ran between the rows of Douglas firs, their shrieks bright as tinsel. Someone's beagle was having a philosophical disagreement with a tree stand.
"Nervous?" I asked Alex—that's what everyone here called him, though he'd always be Konstantin in the dark when I whispered his name.
His hand tightened slightly on mine. "Different lot. Different state. Different life."
Different everything except the way my pulse still jumped when I caught him checking exits, even here among the fairy lights and candy canes.
Tatiana bounced against my hip, twenty months old and already too heavy to carry for long. She had his storm-gray eyes and my stubborn streak and absolutely no idea that her father had once killed a man in a place just like this.
"Tree!" she announced, pointing at literally all of them. "Want tree!"
"Ambitious," Alex said, his mouth doing that almost-smile thing. "She gets that from you."
"The demanding part?" I set her down, keeping hold of her mittened hand. "That's all you, baby."
We wandered the rows while Tatiana investigated every tree at knee height, occasionally hugging one and declaring it "soft" or "pointy" with great authority. Other families smiled at her—the curse and blessing of small towns. Everyone noticed everything, but they also minded their own business when it mattered.
The Petrovs, they called us. Nice couple, moved here from "back east" when Diana was pregnant. Alex did construction work, strong and silent type. Diana taught art classes at the community center. Their little girl was a charmer.
No one asked about his scars. Or why I sometimes flinched at sudden movements. Or why we'd paid cash for our little rental house and never talked about family visits.
"This one," Tatiana decided finally, wrapping her arms around a five-foot noble fir that was definitely too big for our living room.
"How about this one?" I suggested, guiding her to something more manageable. "It's just her size."
She considered it seriously, then nodded. "Tati's tree."
Alex hoisted it easily while I paid the youth group kids running the lot. Twenty-eight dollars. No blood. No crosshairs. Just a normal transaction in a normal town at a normal tree lot.
The kind of normal we'd killed for. The kind we were still learning to trust.
Back at the house—white clapboard, peeling paint, permanent tilt to the porch that Alex kept threatening to fix—we wrestled the tree into the ancient stand while Tatiana "helped" by singing a song about angels she'd made up on the spot.
"Straight?" Alex asked, stepping back.
The tree listed dramatically to the left.
"Perfect," I lied.
"Your definition of perfect needs work," he said, but he was smiling—really smiling, not the careful thing he did for strangers.
We strung lights while Tatiana napped, working in comfortable quiet. Outside, rain started pattering against the windows, that gentle Oregon coast drizzle that would last for days.
"I keep waiting," he said suddenly, wrapping lights around a branch with unnecessary precision, "for someone to recognize us. To knock on that door with our old names."
I paused, ornament in hand. "But?"
"But they haven't." He looked at me across the tree, lights reflecting in his eyes. "Two years, and they haven't."
Two years since we'd burned our old life to ash. Since we'd crossed borders with fake papers and real hope. Since we'd decided our daughter would have a different story than ours.
"Maybe they never will," I said softly.
"Maybe." He didn't sound convinced, but he didn't sound terrified either. Just... cautious. Like a man who'd learned to test his weight on ice before committing to the step.
Tatiana woke up cranky and demanding cookies we didn't have, so we bundled her into her coat and walked down to the market. The owner, Mrs. Chen, cooed over her like always, sneaking her a candy cane when she thought we weren't looking.
