Not Ethan
The house was unnaturally quiet at 2:47 in the morning. I had fallen asleep on the couch again, which had been happening more often lately in ways I had not examined closely. Ethan was in Las Vegas for a work conference, the third in six months, and without him the house settled into a particular kind of stillness that I told myself I would miss when he got back.
I was already composing the small domestic pleasures of reunion in my half-dreaming mind: coffee made for two, the sound of his key in the lock, the ordinary architecture of a life that seemed, from the inside, solid. I was thirty-four. I had been married for six years to a man I had met at a networking event when I was twenty-seven and he was the kind of person who knew everyone in the room and seemed to find this natural.
I worked in project management for a regional construction firm, a job that required a specific temperament: methodical, unflappable, comfortable in the gap between what a plan says will happen and what actually happens. I was good at it. I was good at most things that required tracking multiple variables and adjusting without panic when one of them changed.
The marriage had been another project of sorts. Not in a cold way, or at least that was not how I had meant it. I had meant it in the way that any long-term commitment requires maintenance: you check in, you repair what frays, you update the plan when the conditions change.
I had been the one doing most of that maintenance. I had understood this on some level without examining it directly, the way you understand that a hinge in your house is slightly loose without marking it as a problem that needs solving today. Ethan was charming and sociable and had a talent for making any situation feel festive.
He was also, I would come to understand, a man who experienced effort primarily as something other people provided. My phone vibrated on the cushion beside my face. I assumed it was Ethan.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
Tap READ MORE to discover the rest 🔎👇
