Christmas preparations had flown by, a happy blur of tinsel, stockings, and stores full of people that Ava, Jack, and I ventured into with game plans for how to survive. Jack and I even held hands in public a few times. Ava would always notice and her eyes would linger on the two of us, irises bright with unspoken approval.

At least she knew how she felt about it.

In the days that passed after the gossip column about our relationship, I felt Jack withdraw. It wasn’t obvious, and it wasn’t consistent either. But he invited me over a little more hesitantly after Ava’s painting lessons. When he visited my house, he’d come up with an excuse for why he had to come by the back door to let himself in, or call beforehand so that I’d answer quickly.

Paranoia seemed to seep into our every interaction.

That was why it was such a shock to me when the doorbell rang on Christmas Eve. Jack hadn’t called, texted, or otherwise let me know he’d be on his way. My heart still raced at the thought of him visiting, but in my stomach a keening anxiety sprang up.

His brothers would be arriving tonight, and maybe he wanted me there with him when they did. Maybe he wanted to make our relationship more official? My mind whirred with possibilities, and I wasn’t sure which one I wanted the most.

What was certain was that I didn’t want what I got.

Duncan.

He was wearing an expertly tailored peacoat, his coiffed blond hair dusted with a light layer of snow. On his face, the expression I recalled he’d have when he thought he had done something wrong and wanted forgiveness. Eyes wide and searching while he stared at me.

What the hell.

“Char, I’m so glad you’re home,” he said. “Can I come in?”

If it had been six months ago, there was no doubt in my mind I’d have said yes immediately. The desperate excitement that roared in my chest would have gone unchallenged. But since I’d met Jack, since I’d spent time cultivating a better version of myself, something had changed.

Was I glad to see Duncan again?

Some part of me would always long for him to be in my life, even if it was just me mourning the younger Charlotte’s optimism for her relationship. A marriage wasn’t easy to part with, no matter the circumstances. Too much hope woven into it, too many memories of all sorts to cut off entirely.

But I also remembered Jack’s anger when I told him that Duncan had left because he couldn’t accept I wasn’t able to have children biologically. Adoption had been completely out of the question. So Duncan had left, divorced me as efficiently as he’d perform surgeries, always at a remove from the action. Analyzing. Acting. Never feeling.

“Why?” I asked, hoping I sounded as angry as I felt. Duncan deserved it. I deserved it, too, a sense of pride and self bubbling up from my nervous stomach.

“I wanted to apologize for how I treated you,” he said. “And it’s cold out here.”

He was right about one thing: the temperatures had dipped this past week and the edges of his eyelashes were gathering frost. Still, I enjoyed seeing him uncomfortable.

Was that awful of me?

Satisfaction over the discomfort I was causing Duncan started to morph into my own chilliness, and I caved.

“Ok, come in. But I’ve got plans later tonight, so we can’t be long.”

“I know, I know. Christmas Eve and all that.” Duncan took up so much space in the entranceway, his tall frame reminding me of the times we used to hug and my head would reach perfectly into the most comfortable spot on his chest. Another wave of emotion washed over me and I cleared my throat as if that would stop my brain from working.

“Tis the season,” I said. It didn’t mean anything specific but I needed to talk or I’d lose myself.

“How are you celebrating this year? Big plans?”

I saw Duncan’s eyes scan my room, perhaps searching for evidence of a party or of a new boyfriend. Likely all he saw was the mess of my painting corner, because he apparently concluded that he could take off his coat and come further inside.

“I’d prefer to keep this brief, if you don’t mind,” I said. Part of that was a lie, though.

I didn’t care if he minded.

The thought swelled my chest a bit, giving me a new shot of confidence. Duncan had hurt me enough that I didn’t need to be nice. I didn’t offer him coffee or tea, didn’t even bring him a glass of water. My usual urges were quelled by his smooth, arrogant face.

“You look good,” he said, sitting on the couch and gazing at me appraisingly. My skin tingled from the attention, but not in a good way. When I sat down, it was at the very end of the couch so that Duncan and I had a large distance between us.

“Thanks. So what’s up? You said you were here to apologize, not compliment me.”

Duncan raised an eyebrow, his blue eyes sparkling with amusement. “Ok, then, Miss Wears-The-Pants.”

Don’t engage.

Although I craved the apology Duncan had said was coming, I was beginning to think this was all a huge mistake. Realistically, there wasn’t anything he could say to me that would make me feel better, because what really helped me was myself, not him. I needed to move past any need to have him say anything, at all.

Still, it would be nice to hear.

“Right,” he said, breathing a sigh that could have been frustration. Maybe nerves. I didn’t care to figure out which.

“Right.”

“Look, Char, I know I was an ass. I’ve had some time to think about how I treated you, really think about it, and it tears me up inside to realize that I hurt you so badly.”

I resisted the urge to comment, to accept his apology as he was speaking. Duncan shuffled a little closer to me, gesturing an impassioned plea.

“I don’t expect you to forgive me. I may be a dumbass but I’m smart enough to know that I don’t deserve your forgiveness now, and maybe not ever.”

“Mm,” I muttered, unable to keep myself from being moved. How much time had I spent craving this exact situation? How many such apologies had I envisioned when I was alone at night, left with my thoughts because I couldn’t sleep?

Duncan rubbed his face with his palm, sighing again. “I just, well, I needed you to hear that. Or I needed to say it. Whichever one it was, Char, I want you to know that I understand I was wrong.”

I leaned closer, my heart thawing a bit despite myself. “I’m glad you see that, Duncan. You really hurt me.”

“I did. And what I didn’t see at the time was that I also hurt myself. I was selfish, irrational. Destructive. I want you to know that I took a few weeks off from work after we split up, and I volunteered at an orphanage in Haiti.”

“Oh.”

Duncan had been so career-driven, so ruthless in his pursuit of medicine that he had never done something like that for other people before. I was touched.

"Yeah, working in Haiti showed me the things that really matter. I spent so much time around orphans, people whose lives had been totally destroyed back in the earthquake, and as long as they had people they were close to, they were happy.”

Duncan must’ve seen how skeptical I looked, because he raised his eyebrows and continued.

”Well, not always happy. But they were the happier ones. It made me think. Hard. And I realized that family isn’t necessarily the people you’re related to by blood.”

He seemed serious. I couldn’t believe it. This was the man who’d told me that adopting children ran contrary to every fiber of his being. Who’d said that if we adopted, he wouldn’t have been able to bond with the child.

I could feel a slow-bubbling fury starting to simmer deep within me. It had felt good to hear him apologize, for once, to try to make some form of amends. I knew I deserved something like that now. Being around Jack had helped me build myself back into a person whose self-esteem saw that.

But Duncan was the cause of some of the most intense pain in my entire life. He’d provided me with anguish when he was supposed to be the person who loved me and cared for me. I’d thought our vows had meant something, back when we’d married. My struggles with infertility had done nothing but widen a gap between us that I’d been naive enough to think didn’t exist.

And now he had the gall to come to my house, apologize, yes, but also tell me things he knew I’d argued. Knew I’d felt so deeply in our discussions about adoption, about other choices we could make beyond trying and failing over, and over, and over again to have children…Those discussions had been stymied. By him.

Apparently, Duncan had changed. I wasn’t sure that I liked it.

“What?” he said, finally breaking the silence. Although the background noise of my fridge humming should have filled the gap in conversation, a much greater buzzing in my ears had begun. It was the anger, coming up from the place where I must have squashed it down.

“Are you serious?” I said, my tone clearly bristling with anger.

“Yes!” said Duncan. He either hadn’t noticed my frustration or chose to ignore it. “It got to me. And I see it now, I see what you were talking about.”

At least he admitted it. Remembered that had been my position all along.

Small comforts.

“I’m glad your mind was expanded,” I said. I was choosing my words very carefully, quashing some of my rage because I knew there was no point in voicing it to someone who’d been so instrumental in my breakdown. Duncan was an expert in deflection, in gaslighting. I suspected he’d find a way to blame me for my anger yet again, and I wasn’t interested in going there.

Why couldn’t this have just been a quick apology, a vindication that left me happy?

Why did everything with Duncan have to become so complicated, so quickly?

It was the first time since we’d divorced that I truly, fully felt relief that we were no longer together. My breakdown, my leave of absence, all of it had been recovery time that I sorely needed. And now that I had someone else in my life who shared a sense of pain, who had empathy for those kinds of moments, I saw Duncan in a new light.

He was toxic. No apology would ever fix what he’d done to me, and no matter how long he spent in Haiti, I didn’t believe he’d ever understand what I’d gone through. Because of the way my body happened to be, and because of him.

“Don’t be like that,” said Duncan. My brow was furrowed despite myself and he saw. He noticed the anger and something inside him felt a compulsion to argue with it.

So much for his apologetic, kind, and reformed self.

“I’m allowed to be angry with you for coming to my house and acting like your epiphany wasn’t something I told you all along.”

He chewed on that thought for a moment, shuffling closer to me on the couch.

“You’re right, you are,” he said.

That blindsided me. I was so accustomed to the way he’d needle at me, whittle down my defences through equivocation and technicalities, that I hadn’t guessed he’d just outright agree.

What was happening?

Before I understood it fully, Duncan leaned in even closer and he pulled me towards him. His arms were nothing like Jack’s, strong but needy at the same time. He held me captive and kissed me with lips I had no desire to taste, a tongue that probed into my mouth with hunger I found revolting.

If there had been any doubt left in my mind as to whether I was over Duncan, that kiss was enough to banish anything that lingered.

Duncan was my poison, and I never wanted him in my life ever again.

Just as I freed my hands from his grasp and pushed at Duncan’s chest, trying to turn my head to break the seal his lips had on mine, I heard a voice.

“What the hell?”

It was Jack. No.

He’d come in the back entrance, paranoid as ever about press attention. Somehow he’d stepped up the back stairs into the living room doorway without Duncan or me noticing a new presence in the room.

Duncan’s surprise gave me the opportunity to push him back hard enough to break the kiss completely, to provide a space so I could jump up from the couch and away from his grasp. Duncan’s eyes darted to the imposing figure of Jack, looming over the couch with a glower that would strike fear into a goddamn bear.

“What’s going on, Charlotte?” he said.

And I realized, just then, that he hadn’t seen the way Duncan had thrown himself at me, had kissed me without my desire or my consent. All Jack had seen was me kissing another man. And not just any other man, the one I’d been married to for years, the one I’d had to recuperate from. The one who was inexplicably in my living room on Christmas Eve.

It looked implicating and terrible from the outside, I had to admit it.

“It’s not what it looks like,” I said. And I cringed as I heard myself, the phrase the last resort of cheaters and lowlifes for decades.

“What’s it look like?” said Jack. The frown on his face shook me, his brows deeply furrowed and chest heaving with emotion. “What’s it supposed to be?”

Beneath the anger, I heard him hurting. I could sense the pain lashing back out at me. I knew that he must have been feeling deeply betrayed, having chosen me as someone to kiss, his first real relationship since his wife passed away.

I wanted to shrink into nothingness. But I also wanted Duncan to get out of my house.

He was sitting stiff as a log on the couch, staring at Jack with a mixture of disgust and curiosity on his face.

“Duncan, you need to leave,” I said. The thickness of my voice was surprising. The room seemed to be spinning, contracting in upon itself. There wasn’t space for these two men to be here at the same time.

I couldn’t handle it.

“No, I think Duncan should stay and explain what’s going on, seeing as you don’t seem to be willing,” Jack said. The hurt in his eyes nearly crushed me, the color of his irises still so beautiful even as he looked at me like I was worse than mud.

“I’m ok with going,” said Duncan. He stood abruptly, backing away from the couch. He knocked into the coffee table with a leg and bent down to wince at the pain. “I didn’t realize you were with someone else, Char.”

“Char?” Jack rumbled. “He calls you fucking ‘Char’? Kisses you on the same goddamn couch we were on just the other day, when you told me you were glad he was gone.”

“You’re glad?” Duncan muttered. He couldn’t have been that surprised, could he?

“Jack!” I yelled, trying to break through the din of these two men, each so preoccupied with his own concerns that he didn’t think of me. I wanted to shrink into the floor and never return, but I knew they wouldn’t fix this on their own. It was my time. I had to speak.

“Jack!” I yelled again. “Stop it. Just stop!”

Duncan made a face at Jack that seemed to say ‘yeah, I’m the one who’s in the right here,’ and I glared at him so ferociously he wiped the expression off entirely.

“Jack, Duncan kissed me. He was pushing himself on me, I didn’t want it.”

If there was something inside Jack that was listening to me, I couldn’t see it. He was still clenching his fists and staring into the middle distance. If he weren’t so angry at me, I’d have been struck by the urge to kiss him. Even consumed with fury he was so incredibly attractive.

That urge felt like a betrayal of my emotions, though. I could sense Jack retreating from me, spiralling in his own negative feelings, running from the progress we’d made together. It felt like the floor was shifting beneath me, I was so shaken. And yet Duncan persisted in sticking around, some unwanted party guest who just couldn’t get the hint.

“I wouldn’t say that,” Duncan said, smiling at Jack as if the two of them shared something other than a taste in women. “We have a complicated history.”

“No!” I shrieked. “It’s not complicated, Duncan. You broke me. You left me utterly discarded me when you decided that you had to have biological children. When I said those things to you in our vows about being with you through sickness and health, I really meant it. And you didn’t. I actually thought you’d come here to apologize and make things right, but I was obviously blinded by how much I wanted to hear those words. Whatever it was you went through in Haiti, you’ve been kidding yourself into thinking I want you back. I don’t. Not now, and not ever.”

It was probably more words than I’d said in a row when I was upset, ever. Some small part of me was proud of it, despite the tension in the air.

I’d finally managed to stand up for myself. To chart a course that I actually wanted, rather than reacting to what the men in my life did around me.

It felt good.

Duncan mumbled a few words I didn’t even bother to listen to, and he slunk out the door glowering all the while. Maybe he’d just been through a breakup of his own and wanted affirmation I’d still want him.

Too bad I’d never be seen with him again, if I could help it.

When I turned to Jack, filled with need to repair what had just happened, he was gone.

I was left with the sinking feeling in my stomach and a ragged set of nerves even my trusty paintbrushes couldn’t soothe. So much for Christmas with the Sargents. The only person you could count on was yourself.