“It did happen to me.”
“You and Daniel have been unhappy for a long time.”
“You don’t get to decide that.”
“He told us.”
I turned back to Daniel. “You told them we were unhappy?”
He rubbed both hands over his face. “I told them we were struggling.”
“Were we?”
He did not answer immediately.
That was answer enough.
A month earlier, I had been sitting beside him on the couch while he laughed at something on his phone. Two weeks earlier, he had kissed my forehead before I left for Denver. The night before the wedding, he had sent me a picture of takeout noodles and said he was working through dinner.
Every memory rearranged itself in silence.
“You were working through dinner,” I said.
Daniel shut his eyes.
Chelsea flinched.
I walked past them into the house. No one stopped me. The living room still smelled like spilled wine and expensive perfume. A string of tiny lights had been draped across the mantle, over the framed photograph from our anniversary trip to Maine.
Someone had moved it facedown.
I picked it up.
Daniel and I stood on a rocky shore in rain jackets, laughing into the wind. His arm was around me. I could not remember whether that had been real, or whether I had simply been the only person in the picture who believed it was.
Upstairs, I went to our bedroom.
The bed was made too neatly. Daniel never made the bed when I was away. He left it rumpled, his side of the blanket dragged toward the window.
I opened the top drawer of his dresser.
Empty.
The second drawer was empty too.
In the closet, half his shirts were gone. His shoes were missing from the rack. The navy suitcase he took on every business trip was gone.
He had not been waiting to tell me.
He had been waiting for me to leave.
Behind me, floorboards creaked.
Chelsea stood in the doorway.
“Get out,” I said.
Her hands folded together. “I need to explain.”
