4. Adrian
— ? —
Adrian
The numbers don’t lie.
I’ve been staring at our joint account for forty-three minutes now, watching the same quiet transfers resolve into a pattern I can’t explain.
Three thousand dollars last Tuesday. Twenty-five hundred the Friday before.
Another four thousand two weeks ago - amounts too specific to be shopping, too regular to be coincidence, too large to ignore.
The recipients are medical suppliers. Pharmacies. A clinic I’ve never heard of with a name that sounds deliberately vague.
My first thought is cancer. Someone is sick - Cole, maybe, with his gaunt face and careful movements.
My second thought is worse.
My third thought is the one I can’t shake: What if she’s paying for something she doesn’t want me to know about? What if the medical expenses aren’t for Cole at all?
I close the laptop harder than necessary and pour myself a drink, then put it down without tasting it. The whiskey sits there, amber and accusing, while I pace the length of my study like a caged animal.
This is not who I am. I don’t spy on my wife. I don’t catalog her movements or check her bank statements like a suspicious accountant. We’ve been married ten years, and I’ve never once-
But that’s not true anymore, is it?
I pick up my phone. Put it down. Pick it up again.
Just ask her, I think. Type the words. Send the message. Be a goddamn adult about this instead of spiraling alone in your study like some Victorian husband convinced his wife has the vapors.
I start typing:
Can we talk when you get home? There’s something I need to ask you.
I stare at the words. They look reasonable. Calm. Like the kind of message a normal husband sends his normal wife.
Delete.
Too vague. She’ll know something’s wrong. She’ll have time to prepare a story.
Jesus Christ, listen to yourself. “Prepare a story.” When did you start thinking about your wife like she’s a hostile witness?
I try again:
I noticed some transfers from our account. Just wanted to check - everything okay?
Delete.
Too passive-aggressive. The fake casualness is obvious. She’ll see right through it.
Nina, I need to know what’s going on with the money.
Delete.
Too demanding. Too accusatory. I can already hear her defensive response: What money? What are you talking about? Have you been checking up on me?
Are you having an affair?
I stare at those four words until they blur, until they stop looking like words and start looking like a bomb I’m about to detonate in the middle of my marriage.
Delete. Delete. Delete.
I love you. I trust you. But I’m worried about us, and I don’t know how to talk to you anymore.
My thumb hovers over the send button. This one feels true, at least. Honest in a way the others weren’t.
Delete.
Because what if she doesn’t respond? What if she reads it and says nothing, and I’m left staring at my phone for hours, waiting for a reply that never comes?
Please just tell me the truth. Whatever it is, I can handle it.
Delete.
Can you, though? Can you really handle it if she tells you she’s in love with someone else? That she’s been sleeping with Cole for weeks? That the life you thought you had was a lie?
What are you hiding from me?
Delete.
Who is the money for?
Delete.
Why won’t you talk to me anymore?
Delete.
I feel like I’m losing you and I don’t know how to stop it.
Delete. Delete. Delete.
Fourteen drafts. Fourteen attempts to put into words the fear that’s been eating me alive for weeks. And I can’t send a single one, because every version sounds paranoid or accusatory or desperate, and I don’t want to be any of those things.
I want to be the husband who trusts his wife.
I just don’t know how to be that husband anymore.
I throw the phone onto the couch and pick up the whiskey and drain it in one long swallow that burns all the way down.
Thursday Morning
I come downstairs to find Nina in the kitchen, standing at the counter with a cup of tea she hasn’t touched.
She looks... different. I pause in the doorway, studying her without her knowing, cataloging the changes I’ve been too preoccupied to notice.
The shadows under her eyes have deepened.
Her skin has a grayish pallor that wasn’t there a month ago.
She’s lost weight - or maybe gained it, I can’t tell, there’s something different about the way her clothes fit - and she’s holding herself carefully, like she’s fragile, like she might break.
“You’re not having coffee?” I ask, stepping into the kitchen.
She flinches. Actually flinches, like I’ve said something wrong, like my presence is a surprise even though I live here.
“Stomach’s been off.” She wraps her hands around the tea like she’s cold, even though the kitchen is warm. “Tea feels safer right now.”
Nina has never not had coffee. Nina mainlines espresso like it’s a food group, starts every morning with a double shot that she drinks too fast, complains that my coffee is too weak even when I make it strong enough to strip paint.
In ten years of marriage, I’ve seen her drink tea exactly three times.
Twice when she was sick.
Once when she was pregnant.
The thought hits me like a physical blow, and I have to grip the counter to steady myself.
But that’s impossible. We stopped trying years ago.
We agreed we were done with the heartbreak, done with the hope and the loss, done with the medical interventions that left her bruised and exhausted and grieving.
But she’s not drinking coffee. And she’s tired all the time. And last week I found her crying in the bathroom over nothing - literally nothing, she said, just hormones, just stress-
Hormones.
She said hormones.
I replay the moment in my head: Nina sitting on the edge of the bathtub, tears streaming down her face, waving away my concern with a dismissive hand. It’s nothing. Just hormones. Stress. You know how I get.
At the time, I accepted it. At the time, I was too focused on Cole and the secrets and the growing distance between us to think about what “hormones” might actually mean.
Now I’m thinking about it.
She’s having an affair, the paranoid part of my brain insists. The symptoms are guilt, not pregnancy. She’s tired because she’s not sleeping. She’s emotional because she’s lying to you. She’s not drinking coffee because-
Because why? Because she’s pregnant with Cole’s baby?
The thought is so absurd, so painful, so completely unhinged that I actually laugh out loud.
Nina looks up, startled. “What?”
“Nothing.” I cross to the coffee maker, pour myself a cup I don’t want. “Just thinking.”
“About what?”
About whether my wife is pregnant. About whether the baby is mine. About whether I’ve lost my goddamn mind.
“Work stuff,” I say instead. “Boring.”
She nods, but I see her shoulders relax slightly - relief, maybe, that I’m not asking questions she doesn’t want to answer.
I watch her over the rim of my coffee cup, cataloging more details. The way she’s standing with one hand pressed against her stomach, almost protectively. The way she keeps swallowing, like she’s fighting nausea. The way she won’t quite meet my eyes.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“Fine.” The word is automatic, reflexive. “Just tired.”
“You’ve been tired a lot lately.”
“Work stuff.” She echoes my words back at me with a small, humorless smile. “Boring.”
“Nina-”
“I said I’m fine, Adrian.” Her voice snaps, sharper than I’ve heard in weeks. Then her face crumbles. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I-”
She presses her hand to her mouth, and I watch her eyes fill with tears over nothing at all. Just like last week. Just like the week before.
“Hey.” I cross to her, pull her into my arms. She comes willingly, burying her face in my chest, and I feel her shoulders shake with silent sobs. “Hey, it’s okay. Whatever it is, it’s okay.”
“It’s not,” she whispers into my shirt. “Nothing is okay.”
“Talk to me.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
She doesn’t answer. Just cries against my chest while I hold her and stroke her hair and wonder what the hell has happened to my wife. To us. To the life I thought we had.
She smells different, I realize. Not bad - just different. Softer, somehow. Like her chemistry has changed.
Pregnancy does that, some distant part of my brain supplies. Hormones change everything. The way she smells. The way she tastes. The way-
I push the thought away. It’s too much. Too hopeful and too terrifying all at once.
“I love you,” I say instead, because it’s the only thing I know for certain. “Whatever’s happening, whatever you’re going through, I love you. That hasn’t changed.”
She pulls back enough to look at me, and her eyes are red-rimmed and desperate. “Do you? Still?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“A real one.” She wipes her face with the back of her hand. “I’ve been so... I know I’ve been distant. I know I’ve been keeping things from you. I just-” Her voice breaks. “I need you to know that it’s not because I don’t love you. It’s not because anything has changed between us.”
“Then why?”
She starts to speak, stops, tries again.
And I see it - the moment she almost tells me. The words are right there, building up behind her lips, fighting to get out. Her whole body leans toward me, and her hands grip my arms, and her eyes are bright with something that looks like confession.
Then her phone buzzes on the counter.
Her head turns toward the sound. I watch her face change - the openness closing down, the moment passing, the wall going back up brick by brick.
“I have to-”
“Don’t.” I grab her wrist before she can reach for the phone. “Please. Whatever that is, it can wait. Stay here. Talk to me.”
“Adrian-”
“I’m begging you.” I hear the desperation in my own voice and I don’t care. “I’m standing here begging my own wife to have a conversation with me. Do you understand how insane that sounds? How broken we’ve become?”
Her eyes fill with fresh tears. “I know. I know, and I’m sorry, and I want to tell you everything, I do, but-”
The phone buzzes again. And again. Three messages in rapid succession.
“I have to go,” she whispers. “Cole needs me.”
“I need you.”