Michelle

In the year that he's away, Anatoly gets to thinking about all of the things in his life that he'd been taking for granted.

Florence is as easy to live with as he'd anticipated. A bit… too easy, actually. As things settle down and the press stop knocking at their door at all hours of the day and night, and it's safe for them to leave the flat for groceries and trips to the wash in the building's basement, he begins to see an unsettling pattern in their relationship.

The sex is perfectly good. Fantastic, actually, which he thinks is what got them to this point in the first place. They work well together, physically and mentally. Florence lives the life of a chessman – she makes coffee in the morning, she studies his every movement. He appreciates more than he could put into words the subtle movements of her eyes, the way she bites her lip when she's picking apart something he's said, some subtext even he couldn't read.

They split the housework up evenly – he does the dishes, she does the laundry, and so on. They stay up talking well into the night, occasionally tipsy and oftentimes lapsing into gasps and desperate pants as they move together.

This is everything that he'd missed in his marriage, but now he's missing something else.

Florence doesn't love him.

He's mostly sure that he doesn't love her, either.

He doesn't know how this happened. Had they loved each other to begin with? On closer examination, probably not. It had been days – perhaps a week. They'd known each other a week, and suddenly they were living together. Freddie Trumper was nowhere to be seen.

They don't love each other – they're just convenient for each other.

Once he comes to that realization, it's smooth sailing once more. After all, there's no need to upset the balance of things. They were both getting something out of it – call it a mutually beneficial alliance, call it anything you want. He was happy. She was happy.

Freddie Trumper wasn't happy. His wife wasn't happy.

His children weren't happy.

It was two to four – that should have spoken for itself, but he makes excuses in his mind. They're young – in a few years they won't remember you, and they like their mother more. All of them are feeble, and all of them make him cringe.

The months start to drag on. He tries to be happy, he really does – Florence tries to make him happy. She tries so hard they both end up exhausted and moody, and Florence puts twice as much sugar in her coffee in the morning like she's thinking of Freddie Trumper again, and Anatoly looks furtively about when he's sure she's out and picks up the phone and dials the extension.

They don't speak often. Svetlana rarely says a word before handing the phone to one or the other; Anatoly listens to their tiny, excited voices and steers the conversation clear of when are you coming home?

He's not sure he's ever coming home, but even that is an improvement.

At Christmas – Russian Christmas, anyways, Rozhdestvom – he sends a card and a small gift for each of them – extravagant dolls with velvet dresses and large, glassy eyes that make him uncomfortable just looking at them.

Florence idly offers to write something in the card, out of politeness. Looking at her is almost as bad. The guilt is eating him alive.

It takes the interview at Bangkok to make the decision for him, and by then, he's so attached to Florence and the simple, synced way they live their life together that he makes a martyr of himself in the process. But she has to understand – they all have to understand. He could never live with the guilt, if he hadn't gone back.

He'll be home for Christmas this year.

Maybe someday he'll even forgive himself.