The first thing that changed was the coffee.
She had loved coffee her entire adult life — had built her mornings around it with the specific devotion of someone who understood that the first cup was not merely caffeine but the specific ritual that separated sleep from day. She had opinions about the blend and the ratio and the temperature. She and Luca had spent three weeks in the first month of sharing the apartment negotiating the correct protocol and had arrived at a system that she considered one of the quieter achievements of their marriage.
On a Thursday morning in February she poured her first cup, lifted it to her lips, and put it back down.
The smell was wrong. Not objectively wrong — the coffee was exactly as it always was, the correct blend at the correct ratio at the correct
