Morning light was slanting through the blinds in thin gold bars, laying stripes across the oak table we had bought twelve years earlier from a furniture warehouse off Route 59 in Naperville, back when we were still the kind of couple who stood in aisles debating table legs and laughing about how grown-up we felt. The table had collected the evidence of our life since then. A blue crayon line Emma had dragged across one corner when she was three. A pale ring from a sweating glass during a Fourth of July barbecue. A tiny burn where I had once set down a casserole dish too quickly during a Christmas rush. It was not a perfect table, but it was ours. Or at least I had believed it was.
I sat with both hands wrapped around my coffee mug, letting the heat press into my palms. Across from me, David stood at the counter in his pressed white shirt and navy slacks, slicing an apple with the calm precision he brought to everything. He had already knotted his tie, though he hadn’t put on his jacket yet. His phone lay faceup beside the fruit bowl, vibrating once every few minutes with emails from the city or Slack messages from his team. He was a vice president now at a tech firm downtown in Chicago, and the promotion had done something strange to his voice. It had sharpened it. Flattened it. Turned every sentence into something that sounded half like instruction and half like impatience.
“Excuse me?” I asked, because even then part of me thought there must be context missing, some bridge between what had existed in our marriage the night before and what he had just said now.
But he did not look at me. He kept slicing. One clean wedge after another.
“You heard me,” he said. “I’m tired of carrying everything around here.”
