The Thermostat Treaty

Odalys Pike and her husband Winn had been at war over the thermostat since the first frost, and neither had ever won. She wanted it at seventy-four. He wanted it at sixty-six and called that "character building."

The ceasefire arrived in a box on a Tuesday. The Bedsure heated blanket went across her side of the couch, set to its warmest preheat, and Odalys announced that the thermostat was Winn's to rule from now on. He looked deeply suspicious of this generosity.

He found out why that same evening. He was reading aloud from a very long article about municipal water policy, and she was somewhere far away, wearing her Soundcore P30i earbuds with the noise canceling switched on, nodding at what she assumed were the good parts.

"You can't hear me," Winn said.

"I can hear everything important," said Odalys, which was a lie, and also the secret of a long marriage.

By Saturday the house sat at a brisk sixty-six, Winn felt like a man of principle, and Odalys had dabbed a little Cashmere Mist on her wrists, simply because the blanket made an ordinary evening feel like a small occasion.

They are both extremely happy. Nobody has touched the thermostat since.

Back in the real world: the Bedsure is an electric heated blanket with a preheat function, the Soundcore P30i are noise-cancelling Bluetooth earbuds, and Cashmere Mist is a fragrance set from Donna Karan; the story is fiction, and prices are what I saw on Amazon on Oct 13 and can change.