Vivian sat at the kitchen table, fingers tracing the edge of her mug without ever lifting it. The room was quiet, too quiet, but not in the comforting way—it pressed against her like a weight. She had woken to an empty bed again, the sheets still warm on one side, the other cold and hollow. Another night gone, another night she had tried not to notice, tried not to name what she already knew.
For years, she had told herself it was work. Late meetings, unexpected emergencies, trips that came without warning. But after losing one of their children, the truth lingered behind her ribs, heavy and insistent: it wasn’t work. She had suspected it for so long that every absent hour etched itself into memory—the hurried texts that didn’t sound like him, the faint smell of someone else clinging to h
