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She stopped just shy of making a fool of herself. What was she going to say to the emergency operator? That a muscular man who had been seen wearing a Santa outfit yesterday was now moving in next door, unpacking shirtless, with two tiny female helpers?

There were no such things as elves. There was no such thing as Santa.

But there were such things as curses. And Devra was certain this new neighbour was a threat.

BRADLEY

Bradley should have been thrilled. He was finally getting his life in order! After years trapped in a shame spiral—a longing to ease the symptoms of the morning after, to forget the forgetting, which was best achieved by the exact villain who had started the whole loop in the first place—he was almost one year sober with a place to call his own. So much better than crashing in his parents’ basement, even if he was only renting. Still, he was working hard, scrimping and saving, attending therapy like he used to attend frat parties, and building the kind of life he wanted for himself. One proactive twelve step at a time.

“Oof. What on earth do you have in here, Bradley?”

He rushed over and grabbed the medium-sized box from his sister Lana, holding it easily with just his fingertips. “Here. Let me.” Not five minutes later, he was sprinting over to his other sister, Sara, determined to keep her upright after a brush with toppling corrugated cardboard.

Sara rubbed her arm. “We love you, little bro, and we’re happy to help, but you know we weigh like ninety pounds each, right? You should have asked Dad to help you move too.”

“You should ask Dad to help too,” Lana said near-simultaneously. Even now, at the age of twenty-nine, the twins’ lives and personalities were so intertwined it was difficult for anyone but immediate family to tell them apart.

Bradley’s face twisted into a frown, a familiar restless combination of embarrassment and resentment stirring inside him. There was no way he was calling his father for help. Sara and Lana knew this. And yet Sara and Lana persisted.

“I’m sure the three of us can find a way to manage on our own.”

“Yeah. I know,” Lana said, her voice softening. “But he’s our dad. And he’s a good guy. He cares.”

“He really does,” echoed Sara. “Even if he doesn’t always know how to show it.”

Bradley often had the bizarre impression Sara and Lana were speaking about an entirely different father. Not the same man who had cold-shouldered him after he confessed his issues to his family—with no friends left to tell since, apparently, they had only been drinking buddies. His mother and sisters were distraught that they hadn’t noticed his alcohol problem themselves, hadn’t tried to help him. The women in his life had rallied behind his recovery, their love palpable.

His father, however, had shut down, shut him out, seemingly more embarrassed by Bradley’s admission of guilt than worried about the disease that afflicted him. Or maybe his father simply didn’t believe him, still pouring himself a whisky after work right in front of his son like a challenge—one of the reasons Bradley had needed to get out of that house as soon as financially possible.

Their relationship had always been hot and cold. Right now it felt downright icy.

“You really should call him.” Sara’s voice was sweet, almost childlike. “Give him another chance. I hate seeing you two—”

“If only you’d worn your Wonder Woman costume today,” Bradley interrupted, “then nothing could stop the three of us!”

“Oh my god.” Sara chuckled. “Remember how I was—”

“You were so—” Lana cut in.

“Obsessed with that outfit?” they both finished.

“You thought it gave you superpowers,” Bradley added. “Didn’t you plan to jump off the second-floor balcony?”

“I did—”

“She did—”

“Jump off the second-floor balcony!”

The conversation devolved into the kind of sibling hysterics that could only belong to three children all born within one year of one another, with Bradley being conceived less than two months after the twins were born.

The accident of the family.

Bradley picked up another box. In and out of the house they went. They shuffled a sofa out of the moving van, Bradley on one end while his sisters struggled to hold up the opposite end. Soon the move was almost complete.

A house only twenty minutes from the buzzing metropolis of the city’s downtown core, a view of the Rocky Mountains to the west, the jagged snow-capped peaks poking out from the suburban skyline into a postcard-worthy blue sky.

He should have been thrilled.