2. Cassie #2
At five-thirty, I shut down my computer and gather my things, ready to escape to the silence of our too-big house. But as I pass Celine’s desk, I notice the door to Charles’s office is cracked open, and I hear their voices drifting through.
“You worry too much.” Celine’s voice, soft and easy, pitched low. “Everything’s handled. I promise.”
A murmur from Charles, too quiet to make out.
“I said I’d take care of it,” she says. “So let me take care of it.”
I back away slowly and make it to the elevator before my knees give out.
It could be about anything. A vendor, a scheduling snarl, some office errand I’ve been cut out of now that I’m barely here. There are a hundred innocent things two coworkers might say to each other behind a half-closed door.
That’s what I tell myself, anyway.
But the ease in her voice sits wrong with me the whole ride down, that unbothered warmth, like she’s someone with the right to reassure my husband about anything at all.
That night, I try again. Not the lingerie, I’ve learned my lesson there.
But I make his favorite dinner, the pasta carbonara he used to request on special occasions, and I set the table with candles and the good wine and try to remember what it felt like when we actually liked spending time together.
I remember, distantly, when dinners were the best part of my day.
When Charles would come home and actually tell me about his, and I’d tell him about mine, and we’d argue about clients and laugh about his mother and plan trips we sometimes even took.
Somewhere along the way the dinners went quiet, and then they went cold, and then they became this, two people chewing across a table from each other, counting down the minutes until it’s socially acceptable to go to separate corners of the same house.
Charles comes home late. He picks at his food. He checks his phone eleven times in twenty minutes.
“How was your day?” I ask, because someone has to say something.
“Fine.”
“Anything interesting happen after I left?”
“Not really.”
I take a sip of wine, then another. The silence is suffocating.
“Charles.”
“Mm?”
“Are we okay?”
He looks up from his phone, and for a second I see something flicker across his face. Guilt, maybe. Or just surprise that I’d ask.
“Of course we’re okay,” he says. “Why wouldn’t we be?”
“You’ve been distant lately. Distracted.”
“Work stuff.” He shrugs. “You know how it is.”
I do know how it is. I’m the one who handles his work stuff. I’m the one who knows his schedule better than he does. And I know that “work stuff” doesn’t explain why he won’t look me in the eye or why he flinches when I reach for him.
“Is it Celine?” The question slips out before I can stop it.
His expression hardens. “What about her?”
“I just noticed you’ve been spending a lot of time with her lately.”
“She’s my assistant, Cass. It’s literally her job to spend time with me.”
“I know. I just thought maybe there was tension about training, or if she’s struggling with the workload, I could help more directly.”
“You think there’s a problem because I’m being supportive of a new employee?” There’s an edge to his voice now, defensive and sharp. “That’s what a good boss does.”
“I didn’t say there was a problem.”
“Then what are you saying?”
I don’t have an answer that won’t make things worse. The half-heard conversation, the way she cried into his shoulder, the thousand small moments that add up to a pattern I can’t quite name. None of it is concrete enough to say out loud without sounding like a jealous shrew.
“Nothing,” I finally say. “Forget it.”
He goes back to his phone. I finish my wine and start clearing the dishes.
Later, in bed, I shift toward him, hoping for even a moment of connection. My hand finds his shoulder, and he stiffens.
“Not tonight,” he murmurs. “Early meeting.”
He’s asleep within minutes.
I lie awake in the dark, listening to him breathe, counting the months since he touched me like he meant it. Four months, maybe longer. The dead bedroom started before Celine, I realize now. She didn’t break us. She just walked into a marriage that was already cracked.
But she’s widening those cracks, and I don’t know how to stop her.
I reach for him one more time, my fingers brushing his back, and he shifts away in his sleep, moving closer to the edge of the mattress, putting even more distance between us.
There was a version of this bed, not that long ago, where he slept curled around me, where his arm was a weight across my waist that I complained about and secretly loved.
I don’t know where that man went. I don’t know if he left slowly or all at once, if there was a specific night the warmth drained out of us or if it just evaporated so gradually that neither of us noticed until the bed had gone cold on both sides.
Tomorrow I’ll go to the office and smile at Celine and pretend I don’t notice how she looks at my husband. Tomorrow I’ll be the perfect wife and the perfect colleague and the perfect professional, because that’s what I do.
But tonight, I let myself feel it: the cold certainty that my marriage is crumbling, and everyone can see it except Charles.
Or maybe Charles sees it most of all, and that’s exactly why he keeps looking away. Maybe the looking away is the point. Maybe a man only refuses to see his wife when he’s already decided he wants to be looking at someone else.