Chapter 1
BUT YOU ONLY JUST GOT HOME…
The chicken is drying out.
I pull open the oven and stare at it—herb-crusted, golden, sitting in a pool of juice that’s reducing past caramelized into burnt.
His favorite. Roasted chicken with the garlic-thyme rub I learned from his mother, because of course I did, because I’m the kind of wife who learns her mother-in-law’s recipes and doesn’t complain about it.
He’s been gone two weeks. I set the table with cloth napkins.
The garage door grinds open and my hands go straight to my hair. Smoothing, tucking. I catch my reflection in the microwave door—flushed, too dressed up for dinner in my own kitchen on a Tuesday—and look away before I can think about that too hard.
His keys hit the counter. Footsteps.
“Smells incredible in here.” Caleb rounds the corner with his carry-on clattering behind him and he gives me the smile. The one that used to crack me open. Now it lands and I can’t tell if the warmth in my chest is love or just relief that he showed up at all.
“I made your chicken.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“I wanted to.”
He kisses my temple. Dry lips. He smells like airport—recycled air, coffee, that chemical rental-car tang. I pull out his chair and he sits, and before his napkin hits his lap, his phone is in his hand. Screen tilted away from me.
I set the chicken down. Pour the wine. He takes a sip without looking at the glass.
“How was Charlotte?”
“Long.” His thumb scrolls. “New client’s a nightmare. Dave almost walked.”
“Dave who handles the—?”
“The Sinclair people, yeah.” Scroll, scroll. He sets the phone face-down, picks up his fork, takes a bite. “This is perfect, Mar.”
“Thanks.” I cut into my own piece. “So what happened with Dave?”
“Just the usual. Client wants everything yesterday, nobody wants to pay for it.” He chews, swallows, reaches for the phone again. Catches himself. Puts his hand flat on the table instead, but his fingers are drumming against the cloth.
“I was thinking maybe this weekend we could—”
“Hmm?”
He’s not even pretending. His eyes keep sliding to the phone like it’s pulling at him.
“Never mind.”
“No, what? Tell me.”
“I said maybe this weekend. We could do something. Just us.”
“Yeah. Sure. We’ll figure something out.” The voice he uses when he agrees to things he has no intention of doing. I know that voice. I’ve been married to that voice for years.
His phone buzzes against the tablecloth.
“You can get it if you need to.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Caleb.”
“It’s nothing, Mara.”
The phone buzzes again. His knee starts bouncing under the table and I can feel the vibration through the floor, up through my chair.
“Sorry—just let me—” He pushes back from the table. “Two seconds. I swear.”
He disappears down the hall. His office door clicks shut—quiet, deliberate, a sound that says this is private.
I sit with my fork in my hand and my chicken going cold.
Then I hear him laugh.
Not the flat sound he gives my stories about work.
Not the polite thing he does when I show him something on my phone.
This is real—surprised, full-body, pulled out of him by someone who knows exactly where to reach.
My ribs squeeze. When was the last time I got that laugh out of him?
I can’t pin it to a day or a fight or a moment.
It just thinned out over months, replaced by courtesy laughs he hands me like loose change, and now it’s pouring out of him behind a closed door for someone else.
My eyes sting. I press my tongue hard against the roof of my mouth and breathe through it.
I get up and scrape his plate into the trash. Half full. The wet thunk of chicken hitting the bag is the loudest thing in this house.
His office door opens. He walks back into the kitchen with his whole face different—relaxed, soft, jaw unclenched. He looks like a man who just had a conversation with someone he actually wants to talk to.
“Sorry about that. Paul needed me to sign off on something before—”
“You said Dave before.”
A flicker. Just a half-second thing behind his eyes—there and gone. Then: “Dave called about Paul’s situation. Two different people, babe.”
Babe. He hasn’t called me babe in months and now it shows up to smooth something over. I feel it land wrong, like a key jammed into the wrong lock. My fingers tighten around my wine glass and I set it down carefully because part of me wants to throw it.
“Listen.” He leans against the doorframe. “I gotta fly back to Charlotte tomorrow morning. Something came up with—”
“You just got home.”
It cracks out of me harder than I mean it to. His chin pulls back.
“This is my job, Mara. You think I want to—”
The doorbell rings.
We both freeze. His mouth is still open around whatever he was about to say, and my pulse is hammering in my ears, and the doorbell rings again—two cheerful, oblivious chimes cutting straight through the middle of something that was about to become a fight.
Caleb straightens up. I wipe my eyes fast with the back of my hand and go to the door.
Sloane is standing on my porch in a silk blouse and red lipstick, holding a bottle of rosé like a trophy.
“I was at the Donnelly opening in Midtown and I thought—when was the last time I just showed up?” She pushes past me in a wave of perfume, something warm and amber I don’t recognize. “Surprise!”
“Sloane, this isn’t really a great—”
She stops. She’s seen the carry-on in the hall and the jacket over the dining room chair. “Oh. He’s home?”
“Yeah. He just—”
Caleb steps into the hallway behind me. I turn in time to watch his face shut down. Jaw locked, eyes flat, every trace of the laughing man from five minutes ago scraped clean off. He looks at Sloane the way you’d look at a piece of furniture you almost tripped over.
“Sloane.”
“Hey! Surprise visit.” She’s smiling but her body has shifted—weight back, shoulders squared, the rosé bottle clutched against her chest.
“I’m going upstairs.” He doesn’t wait for a response. Doesn’t look at me. Doesn’t look at her again. Just turns and walks up the stairs and the bedroom door closes.
My best friend is standing in my foyer. My husband just left the room like it was on fire. And somehow I’m the one who feels like she needs to apologize.
“What the hell was that?” Sloane says.
“I honestly don’t know.” I take the rosé from her because I need something in my hands. “He’s been like this for months. Worse, actually. We were just—we were in the middle of something when you got here.”
“A fight?”
“Getting there.” My voice wobbles and I clamp down on it. “He barely talked through dinner, and then he got a phone call and disappeared, and when he came back he was laughing, Sloane. Like—happy. Really happy. And then two seconds later he tells me he’s leaving again tomorrow.”
Sloane hops up on the counter and crosses her legs. Tilts her head. “Is everything okay? With you two?”
“I don’t know.” My throat tightens around the words. “He’s gone more than he’s here. And when he’s here he’s not here. I made his favorite dinner and he couldn’t go five minutes without checking his phone and now he can’t even stay in the room long enough to say hello to you.”
“You’ve said things haven’t been great recently.”
It sits between us. She’s right—I’ve been dropping pieces of this into our lunches and our texts for weeks, careful little crumbs of honesty. Sloane always picks them up, turns them over with this exact concerned expression, and sets them back down.
“But enough.” I rip the foil off the rosé because if I keep going my voice is going to crack and I’m done with that tonight. “Tell me about your mystery man. Any updates?”
The change is instant. Her whole body shifts—spine straight, eyes bright, hands pressed together. She goes from concerned friend to lit up from the inside so fast it almost gives me whiplash.
“Mara. Oh my God.” She grabs my arm. “So last week—he took me to this rooftop restaurant. I can’t tell you which one because someone might figure out who he is—but there were real candles everywhere, and he’d ordered everything in advance—”
“He pre-ordered?”
“Course by course. The waiter just kept bringing things. And at the end he hands me this box, and it’s this bracelet I mentioned once, like three months ago. He remembered.”
I pour the wine and hand her a glass, trying to convince myself that my jealousy is bad. I know I should be thrilled for her, but I want the same happiness that I used to have with Caleb. “He sounds intense.”
“He’s just—he knows what he wants, you know? He’s not one of those guys who makes you guess.” She takes a sip and closes her eyes. “When he’s with me, he’s with me. Phone away, eye contact, the whole thing.”
Something twists behind my sternum. Phone away. Eye contact. The whole thing. Everything I just begged for across a dinner table and didn’t get.
“When do I get to meet him?”
“Soon. I promise.” She squeezes my hand. “When it’s official, you will be the first to know. You’ll love him.”
“I better.”
I say it like a joke. It doesn’t land like one.
She hugs me at the door, tight and perfumed, her cheek pressed against mine. “Call me if you need anything. Anytime. I mean it, Mara.”
“I know you do.”
She’s pulling her phone out before she reaches the car. Thumbs already flying, face bright in the screen glow—texting the man who pre-orders dinner and remembers bracelets while I stand in my doorway in a dirty kitchen with a husband packing a bag upstairs.
I close the door. Lean against it.
The house is quiet. I can hear Caleb moving around above me—drawers opening, the thump of him moving his suitcase.
I pour what’s left of the rosé and drink it standing at the counter.
My brain keeps circling back to the top of the stairs.
His face shutting down. Not annoyed, not antisocial—I’ve seen both of those on him a thousand times and this wasn’t either.
This was something tighter. More controlled.
Like something in that room was dangerous and he needed to get away from it before it touched him.
He looked caught.
The thought floats up and I push it down. Too paranoid. Too much wine. Too many lonely nights filling the quiet with worst-case scenarios. Caleb doesn’t love small talk. He doesn’t love surprise guests. That’s all this is. He’s never been a fan of Sloane, despite her being my best friend.
But the push doesn’t hold. The thought keeps rising back, tapping at me through the wine and the exhaustion and the sound of my husband packing for a trip he won’t explain.
I finish the glass. Rinse it. Go upstairs. The bedroom is dark. He’s already in bed—or pretending to be asleep. I brush my teeth, wash my face, climb in beside him and lie there listening to him breathe.
It used to be the best sound in the world.