3. Kai
— ? —
Kai
I can’t make myself go inside.
The house rises up ahead of me, all glass and sharp angles.
My father helped design this place, back when I was a kid who thought architecture was boring and parents lived forever.
He’d sit at the kitchen table with blueprints spread everywhere, tracing lines with his finger, explaining sight lines and structural integrity to a ten-year-old who just wanted to play video games.
“Every detail matters,” he’d said. “The foundation, the framing, the way the light comes through the windows. You build something right, it lasts forever.”
I’d nodded along, not understanding and not caring, because I was ten and I had a lifetime to learn about foundations and framing and all the ways things can fall apart. Turns out I had six more years.
Now I sit in my car in the driveway, engine off, hands gripping the wheel so tight my knuckles have gone white, and I think about foundations, about things that are supposed to last forever, and about how a structure fails when you’re not paying attention to the cracks.
The dashboard clock reads 12:31 a.m.
Through the bedroom window I can see that the light is off. Erika gave up hours ago and went to bed alone, the way she does most nights now, and left me to the silence and the dark and the guilt that’s been eating me alive for months.
I should go inside, slip between the sheets, pull her close, and pretend everything is fine. But my father’s ghost is in this house, in the angles he designed and the windows he chose and the foundation he laid eighteen years ago for a future he’d never see.
I remember the day he showed me the final blueprints. I was maybe twelve, old enough to pretend I was interested, still young enough to think my parents were immortal.
“This is where you’ll raise your family someday,” he’d said, pointing to the master bedroom. “Big windows facing east so you can watch the sunrise with your wife.”
“Dad, gross.”
He’d laughed. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”
I understand now that he built this house for a future he imagined for me, a future with a wife and children and Sunday mornings watching the sun come up, and that he never got to see any of it.
He never got to meet Erika, never got to walk her down the aisle when her own father couldn’t be bothered to show up, never got to tell me if I was doing this right or fucking it all up.
“You’re the man of the house now, Kai.”
I was sixteen when I heard those words, though I’m not sure who said them, maybe my grandmother, maybe one of the men in suits who handed me papers I was too young to understand, or maybe just the voice in my own head filling the silence my father left behind.
I was sixteen, standing in a hospital hallway that smelled like antiseptic and grief, still in the school clothes I’d been wearing when the call came, because nobody had thought about clothes.
The doctor was saying something about “instantaneous” and “no suffering,” words that were supposed to be comforting but just felt like lies. My grandmother had her hand on my shoulder, her grip too tight, like she was afraid I’d disappear too if she let go.
I didn’t cry then, or at the funeral, or when I signed the papers that said all of it would be mine someday.
I cried three weeks later, alone in my childhood bedroom in this house, when I found one of my father’s ties hanging on the back of my door.
He’d come in late the night before he died to say goodnight, still in his suit, and pulled the tie loose while he sat on the end of my bed talking, and hooked it over the top of my door on his way out, and said he’d grab it in the morning, and there wasn’t a morning.
The car is cold and I should go inside, and I don’t move.
I finally drag myself out of the car at 1:15 a.m., legs stiff from sitting, the keys biting into my palm like I’ve been holding them as a threat.
The house is dark and silent, and I take off my shoes in the foyer so my footsteps won’t echo on the marble. The stairs creak despite my efforts, and I freeze on the landing, listening, but there’s nothing, so she’s asleep.
The bedroom door swings open without a sound, and there she is, hair spread across the pillow like a painting, one hand tucked under her cheek, moonlight catching the curve of her shoulder where the blanket has slipped down. So fucking beautiful it hurts.
On her nightstand there’s a letter with my handwriting on the envelope, and my chest tightens.
I step closer, careful not to wake her, and recognize it immediately. One of the love letters I used to write her when we were first married. Pages and pages of borrowed poetry and original promises, sealed with wax because I’d thought it was romantic and she’d laughed at me for being ridiculous.
She kept them, all of them, in a box in her closet that she thinks I don’t know about, and now one of them is on her nightstand, like she needed to remind herself of who we used to be, of who I used to be before the work swallowed me whole.
I want to pick it up and read whatever twenty-three-year-old me had to say, find out if he had answers I’ve forgotten, but touching it feels like trespassing on something that isn’t mine anymore.
I strip off my clothes and slide into bed behind her, pulling her against my chest. She’s warm and she smells like the vanilla lotion she uses before bed, and for a moment I can pretend that everything is fine, that I haven’t been failing her for months, that the distance between us is only physical and easy to close.
She stirs. “Kai?”
“Shh. Go back to sleep.”
“What time is it?”
“Late. I’m sorry.”
She turns in my arms, eyes half-open, and the look on her face makes my stomach drop, because it isn’t anger. I could handle anger. This is resignation, the acceptance of a disappointment she’s learned to expect.
“You’re always sorry,” she says quietly.
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Erika…”
“Do you know what day it is?”
I search my memory, frantic, trying to find the date I’ve clearly forgotten. Our anniversary? No, that was six weeks ago, and I was there for that one, and the first-date one I already missed. Birthday? Not until spring. What day is it, what did I miss, what…
“It’s Tuesday,” she says, and the flatness in her voice is worse than yelling. “Just Tuesday. That’s the point. It doesn’t even have to be a special day anymore for you to miss it.”
“I’m trying to finish Dad’s block. You know that. Once it’s done…”
“Once it’s done, there’ll be another thing, and another after that.” She pulls back slightly, putting space between us. “There’s always going to be another thing, Kai.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it?”
I don’t have an answer for that, because she’s right, because there’s always another deal, another fire to put out, and I keep telling her “after this one” like a promise I never manage to keep.
“Come here,” I say, reaching for her. “Please.”
She hesitates.
“Erika. Please.”
She lets me pull her close, and I kiss her before she can say anything else, before she can voice all the things I don’t want to hear, because it’s easier this way, easier to apologize with my body than with words I don’t have.
She kisses me back, and for a second it’s the way it’s always been, her mouth opening under mine, her hand sliding into my hair.
I roll her under me and she lets me. She lets me do all of it.
I push the tank top she sleeps in up over her breasts and get my mouth on her, and she arches, and her fingers land in the right places and she makes the right sounds, and I drag her underwear down her legs and she lifts her hips to help, and I’m hard against her thigh and she reaches down and takes me in her hand and strokes me the way she knows I like, and it’s all correct. Every single thing she does is correct.
And I know her body better than I know my own, which is exactly how I know that none of it is real.
There’s a half-second delay on everything, like she’s watching herself from across the room and cueing her own reactions.
When I push into her she’s wet enough, and tight, and she takes me, and her breath catches, and it isn’t the sound she makes.
It’s a sound. Her eyes stay open on the ceiling when they used to fall shut.
I fuck her slow, then harder, hoping harder will get me somewhere, my thumb on her clit, my mouth on her neck, saying the things I say, “you feel so good,” “that’s it,” and she rocks up into me and comes, quiet, a tightening around me and a breath, and she doesn’t say my name.
Erika always says my name, breathes it right against my ear at the end like it’s the only word she has left, and tonight there’s just her breath and the sound of the sheets and my name nowhere.
I notice. I keep going anyway, because stopping would mean asking, and asking would mean hearing the answer. I come with my face in her hair, and it’s over fast, and it feels like nothing.
When it’s over she doesn’t curl into me the way she used to.
She turns away instead, tugs the blanket up over her shoulder, and puts six inches of cold mattress between us that might as well be six miles.
I lie there with my hand on her hip and count her breaths, waiting for one of them to turn into a word, and I don’t know what I’ll do if it does.
“I love you,” I tell her back. “You know that, right? Whatever else is happening, you know I love you.”
“I know you think you do.”
The words land like a slap, and the worst part is she doesn’t even say them mean.
She says them the way you’d read a weather report.
I’ve sat across from men who wanted to bury me and never once felt this outmatched, and here’s my wife, half asleep, gutting me with six words she barely bothered to aim.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.” She sighs. “It’s late. Go to sleep.”
My phone buzzes on the nightstand.
I reach for it automatically, muscle memory overriding common sense, check the message, and type a quick response before I can stop myself, and when I set it down Erika’s eyes are open, watching me.
“Work?” she asks. Her voice is flat.
“Yeah.” I put the phone face-down. “Just confirming tomorrow.”
She doesn’t ask who, doesn’t push, doesn’t do any of the things I half expect and half hope for. She just nods, rolls over, and puts her back to me, and the silence stretches between us like a chasm.
I should push, ask what she meant, force us to actually talk about whatever’s rotting underneath the surface of this marriage.
But I’m tired, and she’s tired, and the work will be waiting for me in a few hours, relentless as ever, and I’ll need whatever sleep I can get.
Tomorrow, I tell myself, we’ll talk tomorrow, and it’s a lie and I know it, and I close my eyes anyway.
I’m out of bed at dawn, showered and dressed before she wakes.
The house is quiet as I gather my things, keys and wallet and phone, the usual armor for another day.
In the bedroom, Erika is still asleep, or pretending to be, and the letter is still on her nightstand, my handwriting visible even from the doorway, a love letter from a version of me who had time for poetry and promises, a version I barely remember.
I should wake her, crawl back into bed and hold her and tell her that she’s more important than any deal or legacy or ghost I’ve been chasing. Instead, I cross the room and press a kiss to her forehead, breathing in the vanilla scent of her lotion.
“Love you,” I whisper.
She doesn’t respond.
I tell myself she’s asleep, that she didn’t hear, that everything is fine.
In the car, driving toward another eighteen-hour day, I tell myself a lot of things. The distance is temporary. The silence will pass. Once this work thing closes everything will be different, and I just need her to hold on a little longer.
My phone rings, work, and I answer it.
And I don’t think about my wife again until long past midnight, when I’m pulling back into that driveway, staring at that dark house, watching the bedroom light click off as I sit there.
She was waiting up, and she’s not anymore.