Now, instead, of only thinking about her preferences, she took into consideration what Nash wanted, too, and how they could find a happy medium—say, for instance, the pan-African fusion restaurant they both loved rather than the Ethiopian place that she craved every day but was on his list of once-a-month places to go to eat.

Even worse, she didn’t mind any of it—except for that date next week on the calendar. Oh sure, they’d agreed not to start divorce proceedings until after the new year, but Christmas was the end of it. No more movie nights where she missed half the movie because they got distracted by each other. No more waking up to the smell of fresh brewed coffee mixed with bacon and eggs. No more falling asleep with her head on Nash’s chest as his breathing got slower and steadier, until it seemed like there was nothing in the world that could touch them.

Sleeping with him had definitely been a mistake.

It mixed everything up in her head, and now she didn’t look at Nash and think orgasms, she looked at him and thought home.

Take this moment, for instance. Usually, she’d have her noise-canceling headphones on, listening to the same song over and over again while she wrote, but her headphones were across the room because she was listening out for the sounds of Nash coming home after an afternoon of putting out fires at his mom’s house.

She was out of her seat a few minutes later, as soon as the dogs started barking at the front door.

She took a second to check her hair in the mirror above her dresser before hustling out of her room. She angled her leg to block the dogs from escaping and reached for the knob.

“Hey there, stranger,” she said as she opened the door, a welcoming smile already in place.

The teasing words were out of her mouth before she realized her mistake. It wasn’t Nash standing on the other side of the threshold. It was Uncle Buckley in his trademark cowboy hat and never-seen-a-particle-of-farm-dirt boots.

“I know your marriage is just a farce, but I expected you to do a better job keeping up appearances rather than calling your husband,” he made air quotes around the word, “a stranger. I swear, you aren’t good-looking enough to be that dumb.”

Even after years of being out on her own and out from under her father’s patriarchal umbrella, her apology was at her lips before she realized it was forming. Clamping her mouth shut tight before it could slip out powered by decades of conditioning, she inhaled and exhaled a steadying breath through her nostrils as she reminded herself that their rules didn’t apply to her anymore. She didn’t have to accede to the men in her family just because. She was her own woman. She made her own decisions.