Tyler had been leaving before sunrise more and more often lately, and coming home later and later at night, the two ends of his day slowly stretching further apart from each other and from me.
“It’s just a busy quarter,” he’d told me the night before, kicking off his shoes without quite meeting my eyes.
“You’ve been saying that for months,” I said gently, not pushing, just noting it the way you’d note a crack forming in a windshield.
“Because it’s been busy for months, Debra. Please.”
I let it go. I always let it go. That was, I understood much later, the entire architecture of our marriage in its final years, built almost entirely out of things I had decided not to look at too closely.
There had been a version of us once, early on, that I still thought about sometimes without quite meaning to. Tyler at twenty six, driving us three hours out of the city just to show me a lake he’d read about, both of us eating gas station sandwiches in the car because we’d left too early for either of us to think about breakfast. He used to leave notes tucked into my coat pockets before he left for work, nothing elaborate, just a few lines about something he was looking forward to that evening. I couldn’t have told you, standing in that laundry room with his shirt in my hands, exactly when the notes had stopped, or the lake trips, or the version of him who noticed which pocket I actually used. It hadn’t happened all at once. It had happened the way most erosion happens, so slowly that you only notice the shape of what’s missing once it’s already gone.The phone had rung twice that week with nobody on the other end when I picked up. A credit card statement had shown a charge from a steakhouse downtown I’d never once set foot inside.
“Just a work dinner,” Tyler had muttered when I asked. “I forgot to mention it.”
“You usually tell me these things.”
“I forgot,” he said, and I let that go too.
I told myself a good wife gave her husband room to breathe. I told myself the perfume could have come from an elevator, a coworker’s hug, a crowded conference room. I rinsed my coffee cup that morning, smoothed the front of my blouse, and grabbed my purse off the counter. A dentist appointment at eleven. A grocery list folded into my coat pocket. There was an unease sitting in my chest that I couldn’t quite name, the kind that settles in slowly, like dust accumulating on a shelf you’ve simply stopped looking at.
