“Thanks,” I said, because I was not ready to confront him yet. If I asked too soon, he would lie too quickly, and I needed to know how deep the truth went before I gave him another chance to hide it.
Dinner felt like a scene from a play where both actors had forgotten the lines but kept performing anyway. Ethan asked about my day, I asked about his, and our forks scraped against our plates like tiny warnings.
Afterward, he helped load the dishwasher, kissed my temple, and said, “I’m going to turn in early. Big day tomorrow.”
“Guest room?” I asked before I could stop myself.
His hand paused on the dishwasher handle for half a second. “Yeah,” he said, still not looking at me. “Just until I get my sleep back on track.”
I nodded and watched him take his laptop down the hall. The door closed, the lock turned, and something inside me hardened into a decision.
I did not sleep. I lay in our bed staring at the ceiling, counting the cracks in the old plaster and wondering how many lies could fit inside one marriage before the whole structure collapsed.
At 2:00 a.m., the alarm on my phone buzzed under my pillow. I silenced it immediately, slipped out of bed, and stood in the dark, listening to the cold house breathe around me.
The hallway felt longer than usual. My bare feet touched the hardwood one careful step at a time, and beneath the guest room door, that same thin strip of light glowed like a secret refusing to stay buried.
I leaned closer. There it was again—the quiet tapping of keys, the soft scrape of a chair, the low exhale of a man who was not sleeping at all.
