It started small.
The smallest things always did.
A cancelled Tuesday. A text that came two hours later than it usually came. A Sunday dinner where Marcus was present and warm and entirely normal and also, somehow, somewhere else slightly — the way a person was somewhere else when something was sitting on them that they hadn't decided how to carry yet.
I noticed on a Wednesday.
Not dramatically — I didn't sit up in bed at three in the morning with a sudden cold certainty the way people did in films. I noticed the way I noticed most things, which was quietly and from the side, in the accumulation of small observations that individually meant nothing and collectively meant something.
He had cancelled Tuesday.
Work, he said. A client presentation that ran long and then a dinner he could
