2. Adrian
— ? —
Adrian
The routines shift by millimeters. Small enough to doubt myself. Large enough to count.
Wednesday Night
Our cooking night - the one ritual we’ve protected since the early years, when we couldn’t afford restaurants and made it romantic instead. I’m chopping onions when Nina comes into the kitchen, already changed out of her day clothes into the soft gray sweater I bought her last Christmas.
“You started without me.” She hip-checks me away from the cutting board, the same move she used at the stove the night Cole came to dinner. But something’s different. The movement is mechanical, missing its usual playfulness.
“Couldn’t wait. I was starving.” I hand her the knife, let my fingers brush hers. She doesn’t react - doesn’t squeeze back, doesn’t smile, doesn’t do any of the tiny things that used to happen automatically between us. “Besides, you’re the one who’s late.”
“Sorry. Lost track of time.”
“Doing what?”
She doesn’t answer. Her phone buzzes on the counter, and I watch her eyes flick to it - a reflex so quick I almost miss it. Her whole body tenses, then releases, like she’s decided not to reach for it.
“Just things.” She starts dicing, her knife work precise but distracted. “How was your day?”
“Fine. Boring. The usual Newport excitement of watching money move from one account to another.” I lean against the counter, studying her profile - the tension in her jaw, the way she’s not quite meeting my eyes. “You going to check that?”
“Check what?”
“Your phone. It buzzed.”
“It can wait.”
But her rhythm falters. The knife pauses mid-cut, just for a heartbeat, before she resumes. I file that away with all the other things I’m filing away.
“So I was thinking,” I say, reaching for the wine, “we could do that thing you like. The risotto with the truffle oil and the-”
Her phone buzzes again. This time she sets down the knife.
“Sorry, I just need to-” She’s already reaching for it, already turning away from me. “One second.”
I watch her read the screen. Watch her face cycle through emotions she doesn’t know I’m cataloging: worry first, then something that looks like fear, then a careful blankness that settles over her features like a mask.
“Everything okay?”
“Fine.” She types a quick response, her thumbs moving fast. “Just Cole checking in.”
“Cole checks in a lot these days.”
The words come out sharper than I intended. Her head snaps up, and for a moment I see something flash in her eyes - guilt, maybe, or defensiveness.
“He’s going through a hard time, Adrian.”
“So you’ve said. Multiple times. Without actually telling me what the hard time is.”
“I told you. It’s private. Family stuff.”
“Family stuff.” I repeat the words slowly, tasting them. “You know, that phrase used to mean something specific. Now it’s just... a wall. Every time I ask a question, you throw up the ‘family stuff’ wall and expect me to stop pushing.”
“Because I need you to stop pushing.” She slides the phone into her pocket, but I notice her hand is trembling. “Please. I know this is hard. I know you’re worried. But I made a promise, and I can’t-”
“What about your promise to me?”
The question lands like a slap. Nina goes still.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means we promised each other honesty. Ten years ago, in front of everyone we loved, we promised to share everything - the good, the bad, all of it.” I set down the wine bottle too hard. It clanks against the counter. “When did Cole’s secrets become more important than that promise?”
“They’re not more important-”
“Then tell me what’s going on.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I gave him my word!” Her voice rises, cracking on the last word. “I know you don’t understand. I know this is killing you. But Cole trusted me with something, and I can’t betray that trust. Not even for you.”
Not even for you. The words echo in the sudden silence.
“Okay,” I say finally. My voice sounds hollow even to me. “Okay.”
I pick up my wine glass and walk out of the kitchen, leaving her standing alone at the counter with her phone in her pocket and her secrets intact.
***
We finish cooking in silence.
Not the comfortable silence of a couple who doesn’t need words - the heavy, suffocating silence of two people who have too many words and no way to say them. She stirs the risotto. I chop vegetables. We move around each other like strangers sharing a too-small space.
“Remember the time we tried to make that soufflé?” I try, desperate to break the tension.
“Mmm.”
“And it collapsed and you cried?”
“I didn’t cry. I was disappointed.”
“You absolutely cried. You said, and I quote, ‘This soufflé is a metaphor for my entire life.’”
She should laugh. She always laughs at that story. Instead, she just nods, her attention somewhere else entirely.
“That was dramatic of me.”
“That was you. That’s why I love you.”
Her hands go still on the wooden spoon. For a moment, I think she’s going to say something - something real, something honest, something that will crack open this terrible distance between us.
Then her phone buzzes again.
She pulls it out, reads the screen, and I watch her face do that complicated thing it does now - the thing where she’s clearly receiving news she can’t share with me, news that matters more than the risotto congealing on the stove, news that makes her look at me with apology and guilt and something else I can’t name.
“I need to make a call,” she says. “Can you finish this?”
“Nina-”
“Five minutes. I promise.”
She’s gone before I can respond, the French doors swinging shut behind her, her voice swallowed by the wind off the Atlantic. I stand there with a wooden spoon in my hand and risotto going stiff in the pan and the distinct feeling that I’ve just been left at my own dinner party.
Through the glass, I can see her pacing on the veranda. Her free hand gestures wildly as she talks. At one point, she presses her palm to her forehead - the gesture she makes when she’s overwhelmed, when everything is too much.
I want to go to her. I want to wrap my arms around her and demand answers and refuse to let go until she tells me what the hell is happening to us.
But I don’t.
I turn off the stove and pour myself another glass of wine and wait for my wife to come back from wherever she goes when she leaves me.
***
She returns twenty-three minutes later, eyes red-rimmed, smile too bright.
“Sorry about that. Cole needed to talk through some stuff.”
“Cole.” I don’t bother hiding the bitterness. “Of course.”
“Don’t say it like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like his name is a disease. Like I’m doing something wrong by being there for my oldest friend.”
“I never said you were doing something wrong.”
“You didn’t have to.” She grabs her wine glass, takes a long drink. “It’s written all over your face, Adrian. Every time I mention him. Every time my phone buzzes. You look at me like I’m already guilty of something.”
“Are you?”
The question falls between us like a bomb. Nina’s face goes pale.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.” I step closer, and I can feel the anger building in my chest - weeks of swallowed suspicions, finally rising to the surface.
“You disappear for hours without explanation. You take phone calls in secret. And when I ask you about any of it, you hide behind ‘Cole’s privacy’ like it’s a magic shield that makes questions disappear. ”
“I told you-”
“You’ve told me nothing. You’ve told me words that sound like answers but aren’t.
‘Family stuff.’ ‘Private.’ ‘He needs me.’ None of that actually explains anything, Nina.
None of that tells me why my wife comes home smelling like hospital waiting rooms. None of that tells me why our cooking night is now also Cole’s therapy hour. ”
“It’s not-” She presses her fingers to her temples. “It’s not like that.”
“Then what is it like? Because from where I’m standing, it looks like you’ve checked out of our marriage to manage someone else’s life.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Fair?” The word explodes out of me. “You want to talk about fair? How about the fact that I eat dinner alone three nights a week now? How about the fact that you flinch every time I touch you? How about the fact that I lie awake at night trying to remember the last time you looked at me - really looked at me - like I mattered more than whatever’s on your phone? ”
She’s crying now. Tears streaming down her face, her hands shaking as she sets down her wine glass.
“Adrian, please-”
“Just tell me.” My voice breaks. I hate that it breaks. “Whatever it is, whatever you’re hiding, I can handle it. What I can’t handle is this. This... limbo. This feeling like I’m losing you inch by inch and I don’t even know why.”
“You’re not losing me.”
“Then prove it. Tell me what’s going on with Cole.”
She opens her mouth. Closes it. Opens it again.
And then - nothing. Her shoulders slump. Her eyes drop to the floor.
“I can’t,” she whispers. “I’m sorry. I just... I can’t.”
The silence that follows does more damage than shouting would. I stare at my wife - this woman I’ve loved for a decade, this woman I thought I knew better than anyone - and I feel something shift between us. Something permanent.
“Okay,” I say finally. “Okay.”
I walk out of the kitchen. Up the stairs. Into our bedroom, where I stand at the window and watch the ocean do what the ocean always does - crash and retreat, indifferent to the small tragedies of the people who live beside it.
Downstairs, I hear Nina crying.
I don’t go back.
***
Saturday Morning
The day of our standing Ocean Avenue tradition.
I’ve been awake for hours, lying in bed beside a wife who came to sleep smelling like salt tears and didn’t reach for me once.
Now the sun is up, and I’m making coffee, and I’m telling myself that today will be different.
Today we’ll get in the car and drive the loop and remember why we fell in love.
Ten years of Saturdays. Rain or shine. Through fertility treatments and failed pregnancies and all the ordinary devastations of a long marriage. We’ve never missed it.