I had told myself that the car was his, that he would not notice if I did not use it, that he had bigger things to worry about than whether his wife was running errands.
But he noticed.
Then I force my shoulders to relax and turn, my face a mask of calm.
“Yes,” I say. My voice is steady. I am proud of my voice. “I’ve been walking to get groceries. I like it.”
The words are true enough. I do walk. I do get groceries. I just do other things too. Things he cannot know about.
His eyes search mine. Then he lets out a soft sigh. The tension in his shoulders releases. He believes me. “You don’t have to work so hard, Nora. You can rest.”
Rest.
The word is a joke. I have never rested. I have never known how. Rest is for people who are not waiting for the next blow.
I give a noncommittal hum and turn back to the sink, my knuckles white around the sponge.
Please, just go.
He stays.
He stands behind me. I can feel him shifting his weight from foot to foot. I can feel him opening his mouth and closing it again.
He is working up to something.
Then he blurts it out:
“I bought tickets to Bali.”
I pause.
He takes a hurried step closer, the words tumbling out in a rehearsed rush. “We never got to go on our honeymoon. I was always working. I thought… we could go now. A fresh start. We can reconnect. It would help.”
You.
It would help you.
He keeps talking, filling the silence I refuse to break. His voice is bright, desperate, the voice of a man who is trying to sell something that no one wants to buy. “You’ve always loved the ocean.”
No, I haven’t.
The ocean is chaos.
It has no walls.
Its mood shifts without warning.
It pulls you under and does not care if you breathe.
But Julian does not know that. He has never asked. He has never wanted to know who I really am, because who I really am is inconvenient. Who I really am does not fit into the shape of the wife he wanted.
He is still talking. Something about the villa. About the beaches. About the restaurants and the sunsets and the way the light hits the water in the evening.
I turn slowly to face him. I am buying myself time. A few seconds to breathe, to think, to decide which version of myself I am going to be. The wife who saysokayand goes back toscrubbing the pot. Or the woman who is leaving tomorrow and has nothing left to lose.
His expression is full of fragile hope.
My mouth is already forming the word “okay.” It is the automatic response, the path of least resistance I’ve walked for months to maintain the peace.Okayis the word that has kept the roof over my head and the food on my table.Okayis the word that has allowed me to move through this house like a ghost, unseen, unquestioned, unbothered.
