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A team shows up the Saturday before Thanksgiving to decorate your cottage.

You remember signing the contract with them, but not telling them when to come.

Had you been reminded, you would have canceled.

But, when they’re at your door with boxes upon boxes of lights, garland, and baubles, and dragging multiple 12-foot Fraser firs, you just sigh, let them in, and hide in your bedroom all day.

When you emerge after sunset, your house is something out of a magazine: white lights and swaths of evergreen all over the place, and the trees arranged tastefully in corners with ivory-and-glass ornaments.

It looks beautiful, but soulless. Growing up, your family tree was always a jumble of beloved, mismatched ornaments, and you vastly prefer that aesthetic to the sterile, beige Pinterest nightmare that has consumed the first floor.

Maeve leaves you a message telling you that it is being photographed for a spread in US Weekly . So. That makes sense.

Newport is very quiet in November as opposed to the summer high season.

The snowbirds and tourists have all flown off for warmer climes, making many of the seasonal restaurants and attractions go into hibernation.

The seafood shacks are shuttered, and the gardens of the immense Gilded Age waterfront mansions lie fallow.

In many ways, it’s the ideal place for you to hide out.

Rhode Island is cold, barren, and moody in late November, just like you.

As requested, you don’t call Kai. Kai doesn’t call you. You two aren’t speaking, and there are times—entire hours sucked into invisible voids—where it feels like you can’t breathe due to that fact. It’s paralyzing you, making it impossible to be productive.

Where is Kai? What is Kai doing? You two have spent so much time apart in the course of your relationship due to your careers and busy lives, but you’re obsessing hard over his whereabouts.

You have his location on in your phone, as he has yours, but you find yourself checking it multiple times a day, sometimes twice in 10 minutes.

There’s Kai at the Cyclones’ practice facility.

There’s Kai at his condo. There’s Kai at the grocery store, or getting a smoothie.

He’s able to move around in public much more freely without you; this, you already knew.

Part of you is jealous of every person who gets to deal with him in public.

The baristas, the trainers, the teammates, the doormen.

The other part of you wants to fly down to Miami and track him down to scream at him some more.

You are so angry . Angry and sad, sad and angry.

It’s a sick cycle that just spins ‘round and ‘round in your mind.

You tell yourself that you aren’t going to watch his next game.

Whether it’s for your sanity or a self-inflicted punishment, you aren’t quite sure.

Just to hold yourself accountable, you go for a long run on the Cliff Walk.

The cold burns your lungs even as you sweat through your long-sleeved compression shirt and joggers, pushing your body to its absolute limit.

You run like you are trying to escape something, starting at Bellevue Avenue and not letting up until you reach the endpoint at Memorial Boulevard.

You race by without gazing at The Breakers or St. Mary’s Parish.

Rather, you only stare at the squally Atlantic, at the rocky cliffs below.

When you get to the far end, you are exhausted, and you still have to walk home.

It’s past sunset when you arrive, wrung out with sweat and tired down to your bones.

Your joints hurt. Your mind is heavy. You throw yourself down on the herringbone hardwood floor in the foyer and stare at the ceiling.

Kai, apparently, doesn’t play well in Week 11.

You don’t watch replays or anything like that, but the critics are saying that he’s gotten soft and spoiled.

That Miami wasted money on him. He’s realistically still just bouncing back, but the whispers are vicious.

The Cyclones don’t win, and a bold-faced reporter asks Coach Beausoleil right out what he thinks of the Train’s poor performance.

Coach gives him a withering look, and barks, onto the next question that isn’t stupid, please.

GoGo has been on a short leash over in Vegas from everything you hear—the rumor is that the Rogues’ management put a good behavior clause in his contract—but he posts a very obvious meme on socials of a cartoon train colliding with a wall and folding like an accordion.

When Desiree calls you the day before Thanksgiving, you are puzzled. Usually, you can predict why she’s reaching out, but you are flummoxed.

“Did you break it off with Kai?” she asks briskly.

“Excuse me?” You are positive you didn’t hear her correctly.

“Did. You. Break. Up. With. Kaius?” she repeats pointedly.

On your end of the phone, you are gobsmacked. Your mouth is literally hanging open. “No?” you manage. “Sorry, Des, but why are you asking me this? Did he say something to you?”

She sighs. “I’m not in the business of playing Telephone between my clients and their boyfriends, Sterling.

I’m not personally invested in your love life.

It’s just that there’s a holiday weekend coming up, and that’s the ideal time to bury the news of a celebrity breakup.

First thing on Friday, while all of America is out hitting the sales at Walmart, we release a tactful statement and let it get swallowed by the news cycle. ”

“Um.” In your bedroom, it’s dark. It’s 11AM, but you haven’t opened the curtains. You don’t need to look out the window to know that it’s cold, gray, and drizzly outside. “I don’t believe we are broken up; no.”

“Okay,” she says, sounding unconvinced. “If that changes in the next 48 hours, just send me a text. I’m out of town with my husband’s family in Michigan, but it won’t take much to break the glass on the Trainspotter breakup press kit.”

This conversation keeps getting more and more ludicrous. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“If or when you and Kaius break up,” she explains patiently. “The agency’s had the press materials drawn up for ages. All that would need to be added are dates. We update it monthly. Just like we do with clients’ obituaries.”

You clear your throat. “You’re saying that, all this time, you’ve had a plan in place for if Kai and I decided to split up? And that you have my obituary written? I’m 30 years old, Des.”

“Freak accidents happen,” she says unapologetically. “It’s an industry thing, Sterling. No need for the outrage.”

You are far from outraged. Shocked, but not outraged.

“What does the statement say?” you ask. “The one about us breaking up?”

“I don’t have it in front of me,” she says. “But, you know. The usual. It was a hard decision, you guys still love each other tremendously and support each other unconditionally; please respect your privacy. These things are pretty boilerplate.”

You are biting your lip again. Just when they’d finally started to heal up. “What if none of that is true?”

She laughs. “Does it matter? That’s just what people want to hear. They need the closure.”

“Huh,” you say, because you are at a loss for actual words.

“Anyway,” she says, “as much as I enjoy chatting, I need to help my sister-in-law pick up some last-minute groceries. Like I said, text me if necessary.”

You promise that you will before hanging up.

Despite the fact that it upsets your mom, you don’t drive over to Darien for Thanksgiving dinner.

It’s only about two hours on 95, but you make some half-assed excuses and get off the phone quickly.

You have the means to have a homemade catered turkey dinner delivered to you, hot and fresh, with all the fixings, but you don’t do that, either.

Maeve has invited you to spend the holiday with her huge Indian family in San Francisco, which is sweet, but also sad.

There are at least two dozen invites on your desk, professional and personal acquaintances who would love to give you a seat at their table for the holiday.

You decline them all. You spend the day reading, although you don’t absorb any of the words.

There’s a project you’re working on that nobody but your lawyers know about, and you spend some time composing emails, then promptly unplug your router and turn your phone off.

Not just to “do not disturb,” either—completely off.

Your only preparation for the holiday was having a bottle of Macallan single-malt delivered the day before.

Truthfully, you don’t even like whiskey that much.

Chalk it up as another decision you’ve made that you don’t understand.

You start out drinking it on the rocks, two fingers and a large ice cube that numbs your lips as the spirit burns your throat.

After two glasses, that goes out the window, and you’re shooting it neat, feeling like you’re drowning.

It doesn’t take long before you are rip-roaring drunk.

Alone amidst the picture-perfect holiday decorations, you try to play your guitar, but nothing sounds right.

You end the night in bed, jerking off in a way that’s more painful than pleasurable, watching the impersonal blue blob that is Kai’s location at his parents’ house in Macon.