The crowded, too-much feeling in my chest recedes, hollows out, until I’m standing there with a black hole of absolute nothingness where my rib cage used to be. “I’m sorry.” I blink at this woman. “Who?”

Claire smiles and cocks her hip. “Did she not tell you about me?”

I try to take a breath, but there’s nothing but dead space where my lungs should be.

“Don’t worry.” Claire laughs. I’m standing there half-naked in a stranger’s shirt, and Claire is laughing at me. “I’m not upset or anything. We have an agreement. In fact, I told Jack to go out and have a one-night stand. I just didn’t think she’d actually do it.”

A one-night stand.

A one-night stand.

One night.

Claire looks me up and down again. “And I definitely didn’t think you were her type, but more power to her, I guess. Sorry, I’m intruding.” The woman… Claire… Jack’s wife… she takes a step backward. “I told her I wasn’t coming by this morning, but I was down the street at her favorite coffee place, and I got her a praline mocha….” Claire shakes the coffee cup in her hand. “You know what, actually, don’t tell her I was here. I don’t want to interrupt her special morning. This can be our little secret, right, Ellie?”

She half turns in the snow, ignoring Paul Hollywood at her heels. “I’ll just come back later this afternoon to wish her a Merry Christmas. You’ll be gone by then, right?”

I am gone before Jack is out of the shower.

Chapter Fourteen

Wednesday, December 21, 2022

One night.

It was just one night. That was what Claire said as she stood in the snow outside the Airstream. Like a naïve fool, I’d abandoned all reason and logic and plans. I’d let myself fall for a woman I barely knew on the basis of snow magic. And the next morning, her wife had shown up to remind me that there is no magic. That falling in love with a woman in a single day is irrational, because you can’t possibly know a person after only twenty-four hours with them.

I hadn’t known Jack was married, or that I was just an experience her wife wanted her to have. None of it had ever meant anything to Jack.

I felt so stupid as I unfastened the buttons on her flannel, as I searched for my leggings amidst the chaos of our clothes strewn across the floor. Paul Hollywood barked and jumped on me, and I cried as I put my still-damp wool socks on my feet. I heard the sound of the shower shut off, and I panicked, not wanting her to see me with tears streaming down my face. So I tucked my boots under my arm and I fled into the snow, and I left my scarf behind.