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He wanted to apologize again, to talk this out. But he could tell from her broken expression she wasn’t about to listen, that he’d hurt her deeply.

“Just get out,” she whispered. She sounded exhausted. “Please.”

Head hung, Bradley shuffled out the door. As he walked away, he looked back just in time to see dry snowflakes stirred up like dust as she slammed the door closed.

As he plodded back home, his thoughts were a mess. The kiss, her revelations, the fight he hadn’t meant to be a fight. He’d wanted to hear all her stories—he’d told her as much in his letter. He’d told her he would listen. And when she’d finally opened up, he’d laughed.

His chest ached.

It was only when he was back home, thudding along on his treadmill, that the guilt subsided enough for other thoughts to rise.

Devra was smart. She was well-read—her non-fiction favourites on computational logic and critical thinking a strong contrast to his romance novels masquerading as action adventure. It hadn’t been easy for her to confess her secret. This idea of a family curse wasn’t a detail she enjoyed sharing. I know it sounds impossible. The crack in her voice. The pain of her admission.

It occurred to him that maybe she didn’t need someone to prove her wrong, someone to talk her down, someone to explain away her experience and make her see reason.

Maybe what she needed was someone to believe her.

It started as a Google search, more out of curiosity than anything else. Which turned into a trip to the library, a handful of books, a few pages scanned here and there. An audiobook listened to at 2x speed while he cleaned bathrooms, sorted out the storerooms, and restacked manhandled displays. A few more internet searches, digging deeper, finding more, stumbling into the lesser-known corners of the web. Another trip to a different library. A small dusty section.

Soon he was more than a little preoccupied. Soon he was staying up late at night. Soon he was flipping through massive tomes, compiling notes, finding patterns. And the more he read, the more he researched, the more he found that, perhaps, he did believe her after all.

DEVRA

What a fool she’d been to try to start something new. At the very least, she should have waited until January when, maybe, she wouldn’t have come across as completely hysterical. That was what he thought, that was what they all thought. With charm and chiselled cheekbones, he’d encouraged her to go against her better judgment, worming his way into her home and heart. But she knew better. She should have found the strength to hold him at bay. Not that it would have mattered in the long run. He would have loosened her stories out of her eventually, with his kindly spoken words and reassuring touch. The way his brows twitched when he was paying close attention, an indication he was listening, really hearing her. Or so she had thought. She would have told him eventually. The outcome would have been the same.

It was for the best, she reminded herself continually, stuffing down the rest of the cookies and binge-watching Netflix. All while pretending tears weren’t leaking from her eyes.

When the hurt shifted toward anger, she pushed up from the couch and went to the living room window. She tugged in futility on the rope, on the only threads still connecting him to her. She yanked, her fury battling with the concept of tensile strength. Finally she went to the kitchen and retrieved a knife. The knife. It seemed fitting to use the same weapon that had set this entire letdown in motion. That strange middle-of-the-night conversation that had morphed a feud into a tentative friendship into the possibility of something more. She hacked the rope until its frayed ends fell to the ground. The knife slipped from her grasp, or rather was pulled from her grasp by those damn unseeable forces that delighted in torturing her, and she sliced a thin line across her palm. It was no more than a bad paper cut compared to the scratches on her arm that now puckered a pale pink, but it hurt, it hurt a lot. She clutched her hand and stifled a yelp. Then she swept away one final tear, replaced the screen into its frame, closed her window, and returned her house to how it had been before. Returned herself to the way she had to be.

It was time to get back to work.

On Wednesday, she crafted an email to the project lead. She apologized for being inattentive these past two weeks and ensured him her focus was now fully on the Squally Project. After hitting Send, she only had time to write two lines of code before her boss responded.

Is this email for real, Devra? You have dozens of unused vacation days. You put in hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime each year. I don’t think you’ve taken a sick day since you started working for us. Take the week off. Heck, take the rest of the month off. You’ve earned it. We can touch base in January.

Devra blinked at her computer screen. This wasn’t the reply she’d expected. Worse, this was not the reply she wanted. She’d anticipated a formal reprimand for slacking off and, as punishment, to be (happily) chained to her desk until her performance was brought back up to its usual standard. Taking time off would be the worst thing she could do over the holidays. She wanted to sink her teeth into this project and not let go. Work was her only distraction from everything else. The thought of whiling away the hours as she tried not to dwell on the curse, Papa…Bradley…

This was a disaster.

She was hastily typing her reply, explaining she neither intended to nor needed to take any more time off work, and that she would gladly forgo vacation days for the rest of her life if it meant he’d keep her on this project for the entire month of December, when the doorbell rang.

Devra didn’t react at first, assuming it was any number of delivery people who regularly rang her bell before hustling away, another package left abandoned on her front step. Then she heard the knock.

It was as familiar as a personalized ringtone. The thumps coming in triplicate, evenly spaced. The solid, confident beats.

It was him.

If she’d expected to hear from him at all, which she hadn’t really, she assumed he would have been in touch that same day, not some painfully long seventy-two hours later. Bradley didn’t seem the type to take his time. So when she hadn’t immediately received a note of apology, folded squarely and tossed into her basket, she was certain the next time they’d speak would be during some awkward meetup at the community mailbox months down the road.

Yet here he was.

She had no idea how to feel about it.

“Devra, open up, I have something to show you.”

Something to show her? His tone wasn’t apologetic. It was excited. Again, not what she expected.

Another round of eager knocks. “Devra!”