He nods, still stunned. He shouldn’t be this stunned by a nice gesture. It should be a given, but it’s not, and that’s my fault. I’ve been withholding nice gestures to punish him for not giving me enough nice gestures, and just look at how well that attitude’s panned out for us.

I end up napping longer than I intended because my alarm never goes off. Maybe I imagined setting it. When I heave my sore body downstairs, Nicholas cries from another room, “Not yet! Hold on.”

He clamps his hands over my eyes and nudges me into the kitchen, where I’m forced to wait in stupefied silence for ten minutes until he shouts hoarsely, “Okay! You can come in now.”

“You need to save your voice,” I say as I walk toward the sound of his shuffling. I stop dead in the doorway of the drawing room.

He’s rearranged it: taken out the TV and relocated his desk to a different wall. My desk is in here, too, flush with his rather than squashed into a drafty living room corner. It doesn’t resemble his personal office anymore, but a shared space. My shoes stacked beside his. My candles. His model train. His filing cabinet. My bookshelf, with a blend of my fiction and his non, his collection of fountain pens and my menagerie of Junk Yard curiosities. A marriage of personalities.

His eyes track me, absorbing every intricate change of my expression, so he notices when my gaze lands on the fireplace and my throat closes up. I feel a pressure in my sinuses, a punch to the chest.

There’s a nutcracker on the mantel.

I picture him digging through our tubs of Christmas decorations in storage, remembering my throwaway comment, blowing the dust off Mr. Nutcracker’s glossy black hat. How his mouth would kick up at the corner in satisfaction—There you are. What a silly thing to tear up over, a nutcracker. But I do.

“I’m taking tomorrow off work,” he tells me. “We’ll go pick out a sofa to put right here in front of the window, so we can look out at the view.” Then he adds, “If that’s, uh, okay with you?”

My head bobs a yes. It’s my turn to be speechless. He smiles, and I think he likes doing this, too. Shocking me with an act of goodness.

Nicholas is feeling much better by the time evening rolls around, but he decides he doesn’t want to push his luck by going out in this weather, so we cancel dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Rose. I make grilled cheese, he heats up tomato soup, and we sit side by side on the couch to eat and watch The Office. It’s the best meal I’ve ever tasted.

Late that night, I wake up and need to get something to drink. When I pass his door, I reach out on impulse and touch the knob. I turn it—just to check—and find it locked. I’m not sure I’d go inside, if given the chance. I can’t blame him for protecting himself from me because I’ve been doing the same, but right now our system of measure-for-measure doesn’t infuriate or energize me. It disappoints, cutting deeper than any insult.

Rise and Smile is closed on Thanksgiving, which is fortuitous for us because Nicholas and I put off shopping for a centerpiece until the last minute. When Nicholas was in sixth grade his art class made centerpieces out of tissue paper and candy corn, and after that it became a Rose tradition for him to come up with a new Thanksgiving centerpiece every year. He usually goes all out with big, homemade displays, but he’s spent all of November turning himself into the man on packages of Brawny paper towels and forgot.

I’m sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast when Nicholas comes through the back door. He’s in his coveralls, which I have a newfound respect for because I know how warm they keep you. He takes my favorite blue-green drinking glass down from the cupboard and fills it with two inches of water, then sets it beside my mug of tea. Inside it drops a wildflower. It’s a little worse for wear, having endured several frosts and a snowfall, but most of its petals are still intact.

“Aww.” I smile in surprise.

“It was growing inside the barn, up in the loft. Had to get a ladder to reach it.”

I don’t trust that barn. It’s crooked and about five thousand years old. Picturing Nicholas scaling a ladder that leans on rotten wood is stressful. “Thanks. You shouldn’t have.”

“Yeah, well. Thought it’d be nice.”

“I really don’t need flowers.”

His stare is a death sentence. “Never mind,” I’m quick to add. “I still want them sometimes, probably.”

His mouth twitches, and he eats half of my sausage burrito in one bite. When he leaves to go shower, I admire my half-wilted flower for unfathomable reasons. There is nothing particularly interesting about this plant. In an hour’s time it will be most of the way dead. I think I’m going to blame society for wanting it, anyway.

Societal norms have conditioned me into thinking I need these dying plants in order to feel loved and appreciated. They’re objectively useless and I know that. But it’s the thought I’ll remember, not the color of the flower or how pretty it is. The gesture of Nicholas seeing the flower, thinking about me, and going and getting a ladder in order to pick it is going to stay with me. Watching him drop it into my favorite blue-green drinking glass is going to stay with me.

When I’m finished getting dressed and ready, Nicholas is wearing a green henley I don’t think I’ve ever seen on him before, and it makes the jade in his color-shifting eyes spark. The neckline is wide enough that I get a good look at his collarbones. Good heavens. The man’s got a fabulous set of collarbones. Then I notice the rounded caps of his shoulders. The heavens are very good, indeed.

He’s whistling as he fills the sink with soapy water and starts washing dishes for the first time all year. I gape at Changeling Nicholas and give myself heart problems.

He’s styled his hair differently, letting the soft curls fall loosely across his forehead instead of slicking them back. I helplessly draw closer, until I’m definitely invading his personal space. Is it the hair? The shirt? The flower? The fact that he’s doing housework unasked? Whatever it is, he’s a hundred times hotter today. If he starts sweeping the floor and cleaning out lint traps, I might need smelling salts.

Nicholas’s busy hands in the sink fall still when I touch his face. “You have a nice jawline,” I tell him, hearing the wonder in my voice.

He blinks as he looks away. “Um. Thank you.”