The snow fell in that flimsy, sentimental way that only English attempts at winter could achieve: eager to be pretty, not built to last, more apology than blizzard. Icicles wept from the gutters of a house that was trying too hard. An inflated reindeer stood proudly on the neighbor's lawn, its nylon chest heaving with breathless cheer. One hour since Sandra, his girlfriend, had left for Heathrow. Two, maybe three, until she returned with her parents. The air in the house was still thick with the ghost of her perfume, a cloying, sugary vanilla, the scent of a life lived without spice.

All of it was a fragile silence waiting for a stone to be thrown through it. The silence was broken by a knock that sounded less like a request and more like a demand.

Ljiljana Vuković stood on the suburbian welcome mat like it insulted her. Her black, knee-high boots were crusted with English road salt and urban grit. They deposited a deliberate trail of slush across the pristine entryway tile. She didn't wipe them on the mat; she'd made it a habit to never wipe anything clean. Wind-wrecked teal hair bled dye onto the collar of a faux-fur coat that smelled faintly of rakija, stale cigarettes, and storm ozone. A scarf hung like a noose repurposed as an afterthought. In her hand: a single, violently red apple; already bitten, already blasphemous.

Then, she knocked.

When the door opened, he filled the frame. Ljiljana's Balkan dusk eyes raked over him – the softness at his jaw, the careful cut of his sweater, the absence of the feral glint she'd once kissed bloody. Ten years of domestic anesthesia can, apparently, do that to man. It was hard to recognize the wild thing she'd once carved her name into.

She held his gaze, a smirk playing on her lips. She took one last, slow, deliberate drag from her cigarette, letting the smoke curl from her nostrils like a dragon. Then, without ever breaking eye contact, she dropped it onto the welcome mat and ground the embers into the cheerful fabric with the brutal heel of her boot. A small, deliberate act of war.

She took a long, wet, obscene bite of the apple. Juice glistened on her cherry-gloss lips. Chewed. Swallowed. The ten-year gap dissolved like smoke. It had just been a cigarette break. A long, boring one.

"Ta-fucking-daa," she said with a voice dipped in ash and proprietary affection. Her teal hair caught the hallway light like slick oil on troubled waters. "Missed me, hubby?"

She pressed the half-eaten apple into his palm like a communion wafer. Her smile was a flash of lightning.

"Careful now," she said, her voice a low purr. "Might be poisoned. Or maybe it just tastes like me."