“Well, I am yours, of course.”

By the end of the weeklong transformation, Hall had disentangled himself from the magic, pushing it back out into the atmosphere where it belongs. At the time, I was walking home from work late in the evening and from a block away, I noticed the lights in my house were all on. I ran down the street, threw open the front door, and there he was, standing next to the fireplace waiting for me. I dropped my purse to the floor, tears filling up my eyes as I stared. I heard myself whisper, “Hey, there.”

He was Hall, but different. I didn’t realize until he’d become human all the ways in which he was once supernatural: How his clothes never wrinkled before, and his shoelaces never came untied. How, when he doesn’t have his grooming choices set on autocorrect, he develops a five o’clock shadow.

He bit his lip, lopsided smile stunning as always, holding a bough of faux mistletoe over his head in invitation.

He said to me, his voice all the more honeyed and attractive without its notes of sleigh bells and crackling embers, “Want to start where we left off?”

I leapt at him and wouldn’t let go. He didn’t mind at all when the cookies, which he’d put in the oven to celebrate his “birthday,” burned to charcoal briquettes.

Afterward, he opened his Christmas presents, which I’d kept under the tree in my living room, and didn’t have the heart to put away. (“Scrapbooks! A camera! I love all of this!”) Then I marshaled my relatives onto FaceTime so that he could say hello, assure them he loved me, that he wasn’t going anywhere ever again and had been tied up with an unavoidable work thing, and that he’d quit his job over it.

Now, Hall is simply a man: unmagical, and yet the most magical person there ever was.

*

It’s been nearly a year since he returned. Today is Christmas, and we are at the Watsons’ house.

“My vote’s for the wedding to take place in Lapland,” Grandma is saying, for the fifth time in an hour. There’s no reason for her to still be bringing this up, as if Hall, her biggest fan, has a prayer of going against her wishes. “I want to be the matron of honor.”

“Mom’s the matron of honor, Grandma.”

Mom pivots so that no one will tease her for crying. She keeps bursting into happy tears whenever she’s reminded that I asked her to be my matron of honor.

“Then I want to be the best man. With a black lace tux.”

“Yes. Done,” Hall responds at once. I shake my head at him, bemused. He’s going to pass out when he traipses down the aisle to discover Lacey Chabert standing there as officiant, which is a surprise I’m working hard to pull off. By that, I mean that Athena has dirt on the Hallmark Channel and has called in a favor.