Nothing else to discuss.
“I thought—” The words catch. I try again. “I thought you’d want to talk about what happens now. Whether you’re leaving. How angry you are. Something—”
“Why would I leave you?”
She asks it without looking up. There is no venom in it, no edge to catch on, not even a damned trace of irony curling beneath the words. Just a question with a very simple answer she has clearly already arrived at.
The knife lifts. Falls. Lifts. Falls.
“Where would I even go, Julian?”
I open my mouth. Close it.
“I don’t have a job,” she says, sweeping the chopped vegetables into a bowl with the flat of the blade. “My parents had me married to you the moment I turned eighteen. I’ve never lived anywhere else. You manage everything.” She meets my eyes then. Briefly. “So. Where would I go?”
There is no bitterness in it. No self-pity, accusation, or plea. No cry buried underneath, waiting to be heard. Just the truth, offered plainly. A fact. The bowl clatters gently on the counter.
“And anyway,” she adds, her voice dropping quieter, almost private, “it’s not like you hit me.”
I feel the air thin. The floor drops two inches without moving. My chest caves. A vital part of me curls up and dies behind my ribs, and I can’t name it, can’t reach it, can only feel the cold space where it used to live.
“It was just cheating,” she says, and her shrug is soft, unbothered. “You lied. People do worse things all the time.”
My stomach turns over. I taste bile at the back of my throat.
She turns back to the stove. The soft hum returns to her lips as she stirs the pot—the same tuneless melody from before, uninterrupted, as though the last ten minutes were a minor detour and she has simply found her place again.
“Nora.” My voice comes out broken. “Stop. Please just—stop talking like that. You’re scaring me.”
She glances over her shoulder. A small vacant smile touches her lips. It doesn’t reach her eyes. It doesn’t try to. “I don’t mean to scare you,” she says. And then, as if it might help, as if it is what I need to hear: “I’m not angry with you, Julian.”
The hum resumes. The pot stirs.
Five words that should be a mercy.
Five words that feel like the last door closing.
I stand there with the smell of dinner filling the kitchen. Onions and garlic, chicken and peppers. Warm and oily.
My fingers curl into fists at my sides. I want her to throw the spoon at me. I want her to spit it at me—liar, coward, say it, say worse. I want her hands to shake. I want her voice to crack. I want something hot and red and loud—something I can fight back against, or fall down under, or at least understand. Her anger would be warm hands on my throat.Almost kind compared to this.What I receive from her is winter air, an icy chill. A front porch at midnight with the door already shut. The sound of her footsteps moving deeper into the house while I stand outside, frost climbing up my spine, the cold settling into my bones like it plans to stay. Watching the lights go out, one window at a time.
“Dinner will be ready soon,” she says, her tone softening into something that almost resembles warmth. “You should go rest. You look tired.”
And with that, she turns away.
Back to the pot. Back to the quiet humming. Back to the unrushed, methodical work of feeding us both.
I should go upstairs.
I should give her space, give myself space, let the hours ahead swallow what happened.
Instead I stay.
She doesn’t look broken. She doesn’t look like a woman holding herself together by force of will. She looks like someone who has simply returned to a task that is waiting for her, in a kitchen that has been waiting for her, in a life that moves forward because it does, because it must, and because it requires nothing from her other than her presence.
Something is wrong, and I can feel it without being able to name it. Something about the way she stands. The way the hum never faltered. The wayI’m not angry with youcame out sounding like comfort she is offering me rather than a feeling she is reporting.
Something fundamental in her shattered today in my office. I just know it.
