Eggs are cooked and plated before I reach the bottom of the stairs. The bed is pulled tight, the sheets flat and tucked with precise corners. The plants watered on Wednesdays. Laundry folded on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Dinner at six. Table set at seven-fifteen.
On the surface, our life is a perfect replica of what it was before. Every task is completed. Every routine is honoured. The same quiet efficiency, the same mechanical movements through the same rooms.
But the soul of it is gone.
She is maintaining the blueprint of a life whose heart has stopped beating—and doing it so flawlessly, so without complaint, that some mornings I have to remind myself that something is wrong. She hands me my lunchbox without looking up. My coffee appears on the table without a word. On the couch she takes the far cushion, a distance between us that is never accidental.
I can no longer remember the sound of her laugh.
I try, sometimes, in the dark. Search back through five years for it.
I cannot find it.
There are moments I have to physically stop myself from grabbing her and begging her to scream. I picture it in myhead: my hands on her shoulders, turning her toward me, forcing something out of her that isn’t this awful silence. A cry. Maybe she could hurl a plate across the room. Do anything that confirms there is still a part of her in there that I have the power to reach.
I want her anger. I want it desperately. Anger would be a presence. A presence to push against. Something to work with—a fire I could spend myself trying to put out. Anger would mean she still cares enough to burn.
I want her hurt. Even that. Even watching her fall apart would be better than this, because pain would mean her heart is still beating somewhere underneath all that soundlessness. It would mean I haven’t killed something that can’t be brought back.
Nora gives me neither.
Just this. This utterly airless existence. Moving through our life like a caretaker tending an empty house—thorough, dutiful, as light as a ghost.
In the quietest hours, the coldest fear settles in.
That she is already gone.
That what I wake up next to every morning is only the echo of her. A hollowed-out skeleton going through the motions.
That one day, without warning, even the echo will fade away.
In the mornings, I wake up sticky, tongue sour, eyes crusted. She’s already out of bed, already moving, already somewhere in the house maintaining the life I nearly destroyed—and the thought that greets me before any other:
Today might be the day that she realizes she doesn’t have to stay.
It’s after dinner when the words finally break free.
She is wiping the counter. Left to right, slow, exact, pressing the cloth flat like she’s smoothing skin over a wound. The rag is damp and smells faintly of mildew. There’s a line of crumbsshe corrals with the edge of her hand. Utterly unaware of the hurricane tearing through my chest. Or perhaps aware, and simply unmoved by it. I have stopped being able to tell the difference.
“Nora.”
She doesn’t look up. “Hm?”
“I think we should go to counseling.”
The cloth stills.
One beat. A single, almost imperceptible hitch in her rhythm.
Then it resumes.
“Why?” she asks, with nothing in her voice but simple curiosity.
I swallow. “Because I want to fix us.”
She turns, her eyebrows knitting in gentle confusion. “Fix what?”
“Our marriage.” My voice comes out unsteady. “We need to work on it. We need to—”
