She took scissors from the drawer and returned to the table.
Claire watched her begin cutting. "Should I be nervous?"
"Probably."
On Christmas Eve, Whitmore Medical Logistics was quieter than the year before. Ryan worked until noon because he chose to, finishing a training review with Ben and two newer engineers.
At 11:30, Ben closed his notebook. "You are really leaving at noon."
Ryan looked at him. "That is generally what noon means."
"Last year you were here until ten."
"Last year was a failure of planning. We try not to create traditions from failures."
Priya appeared at the door wearing a red scarf. "Everyone out by one. That includes people who think leadership means being the last car in the parking lot."
Ryan looked toward the ceiling as if Claire might hear from eleven floors away.
"She sent that wording, did she not?"
Priya smiled. "Almost exactly."
At noon Ryan shut down his laptop and left.
Claire left twenty minutes later after walking the executive floor and checking that no assistant remained simply because she did. The lobby tree stood beside the reception desk, and the silver ornament from the conference room the previous year now hung near the front.
Claire paused in front of it.
The memory arrived clearly: Ryan's badge on the table, her own face distorted in the curved metal, Mark saying they had a bigger problem than Christmas staffing.
She did not turn away from the memory.
Then she put on her coat and went home.
That evening Claire joined Ryan and Sophie for dinner. No large gathering, no formal holiday event, just roast chicken, potatoes, too many rolls, and a pie Sophie's grandmother delivered with instructions not to let Ryan claim he had baked it.
After dinner they watched an old Christmas movie Emily loved. Ryan warned Claire that Sophie knew every line.
Sophie proved him right within six minutes.
At one point Claire looked across the room at Ryan. The tree lights reflected in the window behind him, and Sophie's feet were tucked under a blanket between them.
She understood then how wrong she had been the year before when she treated Christmas as an empty square on a staffing grid.
A day was not valuable because it appeared on a calendar in red.
It was valuable because people placed promises inside it.
Christmas morning, the smoke alarm did not go off.
That was the first improvement.
The second was that Ryan let Claire help with breakfast, which turned out to be more dangerous than he expected.
She stood at the stove in one of his old sweatshirts, staring down at a pancake with the grave concentration of someone reviewing a merger agreement.
Sophie leaned over the counter. "Flip it."
"It is not ready."