He changes like the weather: sudden, brutal, and impossible to predict.
One minute he’s everything—warm hands, whispers in the dark—till the next he’s a closed door. Two days after the note, he moves through the house like a ghost again, quieter somehow, every touch measured to avoid the wrong kind of attention. He eats alone. He sleeps alone. When he speaks, it’s brief, clipped. The silence is a new kind of punishment, and it hurts in ways I didn’t expect.
“I can’t do this,” he says the day he slams the car door and won’t look at me.
“You can’t do what?” I ask, clutching the strap of my bag like anchor.
“This,” he breathes—one syllable that contains years. “Us. Here. Like this.”
“So leave,” I say. “Go.”
He laughs, but it’s not a laugh. “I can’t walk away. I won’t run from your fathe
