Chapter Text
This story begins, as so many stories do, with a man and a woman meeting.1 They danced, their bodies moving as if they'd been doing this for years. She was a young architect, on fire to make the building industry sustainable, he was a med student, determined to be Winterlight, Vermont's next town doctor. They'd both come to Boston to make their dreams come true, and that night as they danced they saw their own passion reflected in each other's eyes. One dance turned into three turned into dates turned into late nights talking about everything and nothing turned into her following the man to his hometown turned into marriage turned into two kids. And it all, eventually, turned into a nightmare.
Because Kate, it turns out, was the sort of person who threw herself headlong into a relationship, giving without thinking until one day she realized that for all she gave she never received in turn. Everett, the man so handsome and funny he'd taken her breath away back in Boston, never took Christmas off, her birthday, their anniversary. "They need me," Everett told Kate each time he pressed a kiss to her cheek as he left to miss yet another important day. Always the cheek now, never the lips. "I need you," she wanted to say, but she didn't anymore because saying that in the past hadn't changed anything.
So one day she told him she wanted a divorce. And that is where this story really begins, because it turns out that Christmas had some tricks up its sleeve and had other plans in store.
- This fact is due, in part, to humanity's near-insatiable appetite for love stories. It is also due, especially in the realm of Christmas-themed fare, to rigid heteronormativity.↩