My Ex-Husband's New Wife Asked Me to Take Him Back novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: Christmas Eve

On Christmas Eve I closed the store at three and hung a hand-lettered sign on the door.

BACK ON THE 28TH. GO HOME. LOVE YOUR PEOPLE.

Bernie had written it, in purple marker, and signed it with a heart.

By five the street was empty and blue, and the harbor lights had come on in a long gold string.

I carried the tree up the back stairs myself.

It was a four-foot balsam from the garden stand I had built out of two sawhorses and a tarp.

It smelled like the inside of a forest.

I stood it in the corner of the apartment by the window, where the lake showed black beyond the glass.

The lights were a tangle of old white bulbs from a box of my mother's.

I had spent twenty minutes failing to fix a dead strand.

At six, someone knocked at the shop door below.

Not the back.

The front.

I went down the stairs in my socks and unlocked it.

Gabe stood on the sidewalk in the snow, in his good coat, with a long flat package under one arm.

"I came through the front," he said.

"I noticed."

"I rang the bell."

"I heard."

"It's after dark."

"You can have an exemption on Christmas."

He came in, and I locked the door behind him.

We stood in the dim store that smelled of paint and cedar and cold iron.

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