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The quirk of her lips, the budding of that hard-fought smile.

“You’re being silly.”

“I like being silly every now and then. Don’t you?”

She appeared confused by the question. “But the heating bills. You were the one complaining about the cost of electricity. It isn’t practical.”

“Right. Definitely not as practical as, say, I don’t know, walking over here, knocking on my door, and handing me this gift in person. Maybe I’d ask you in for a cup of coffee. Maybe you’d say yes. Maybe you’d stay awhile.”

Her cheeks were the colour of roses now. Perhaps she too was overheating despite the winter chill.

“That wouldn’t have been practical at all,” he went on, wanting to win this argument, to see where this new bridge between them might lead. “Much more sensible to design some elaborate pulley system. And now, after all that effort, to consider keeping that system set up? Ridiculous.”

“Okay. Okay. I get your point.”

“You do?”

“Yes, but…”

“But what?”

“But…it’s December.”

There it was again. Her naming the month like it was an obscenity. What had happened to make her hate these snowy days so much? He wanted to ask, to get to know her better. But these friendly moments between them felt precarious, unstable, perched on the very rope dangling between them.

So he only replied, “It is, Devra. It’s December. Such a dreary month. So why don’t we have a little fun with it?”

And there it was. Her lovely smile.

“All right. Let’s have some…fun.”

DEVRA

Devra received her first defeat-the-dreary-December delivery the following morning. She’d been checking almost compulsively since last night for the basket to be placed outside his window so she could reel it over and discover what exactly he had planned for her.

Inside was a bagel, as promised, wrapped in aluminum foil. There was also an envelope. It was dusted with snow, but the air was so cold and dry she merely had to blow the flakes off and the paper was left unaffected.

As she ate the mouth-watering bagel, sliced, toasted, and smothered with herbed cream cheese, she opened the envelope and read the note. She grinned when she saw it was a puzzle. A code. Her favourite.

It was a get-to-know-you questionnaire. But each question was embedded in a plexer puzzle or pictogram. The words: Which do you prefer in the morning? Alongside a cartoony letter E coughing and a scribbled outline of a T-shirt, which she interpreted as Coffee or tea?

She carefully wrote out her responses in block letters and created a few puzzles of her own, ignoring the prick of self-consciousness when the basket began its journey over to Bradley’s house. She filled up Tabs’ bowl and settled in for another long session of testing Squally’s algorithms when, not half an hour later, she spotted the basket outside his window again. She rushed to pull it over. This time, the envelope contained a word jumble. She unscrambled the clues, wrote her answers, and scrambled up her own questions. After a few more rounds of this back-and-forth, Devra felt her nerves dissolving, and she decided, yes, this was fun. A game she might play on her own, except she had the pleasure of a partner.

Devra learned that Bradley’s favourite movies were old-timey westerns, and that his favourite books were equal parts romance and adventure. His go-to shower song was “Shake It Off” by Taylor Swift, and his favourite food was chocolate-covered strawberries. When she informed him she had never eaten a chocolate-covered strawberry in her life and wasn’t entirely sure the combination counted as a single favourite food, two hours later, she received a container filled with them, the melted dark chocolate now hardened around perfectly ripened berries.

And he was right, they were sinfully delicious.

Devra’s pencil began to move more freely, her careful lettering growing more slanted—although not nearly as messy as Bradley’s casual scrawl. She told him more about Tabs, her rescue lion, about the time the animal took on a coyote and won. Bradley sent over a list of the ingredients he’d used in the homemade cat food that had so thoroughly charmed her. In exchange, Devra researched the best YouTube channels for learning Excel and asked him more about his work. He described the part-time employees in the seasonal tent with such vibrancy and humour she found herself picturing them as the cast of a sitcom. As the sky began to dim, Devra realized they weren’t playing games anymore; they were having a conversation. She also found herself laughing. Often.

But the next morning, Bradley asked about her holiday traditions, and her mood shifted, her fears resparking. She replied with a simple I don’t have any and tried to change the subject. He relented for a short while but soon steered the topic back to Christmas by sharing his favourite holiday memory, which involved his mother buying the family a karaoke machine they didn’t turn off for twenty-four hours straight. He asked Devra, in turn, for her favourite memory. She responded that she didn’t have any good holiday memories.

In that case, what’s your worst holiday memory?

His question surprised her. The pen wobbled in her hand. She considered telling him about missing mothers and sick fathers, about house fires and fallen ornaments, about curses and inevitable wounds. But she smartened up and wrote I don’t know you well enough to tell you that story.

The next few hours were torture, waiting for a response that never came. As his van rolled away, she flip-flopped between relief and disappointment.

She ran her hands over her face. “What am I doing, Squally?”