CHAPTER 26: STRANGERS UNDER ONE ROOF

The apartment was enormous, which somehow made it worse. Floor to ceiling windows, a kitchen bigger than my entire old place, a hallway with so many doors I'd gotten lost twice already looking for the bathroom.

"Your room's the second on the left," Henry said, setting my last box down in the entryway. "Mine's at the end of the hall. There's a guest suite between us if you'd rather more distance."

"The second door is fine."

"Okay," he said. He hesitated a beat, like there was more he wanted to say and couldn't quite find the shape of it. "For what it's worth, you can rearrange anything you want. This isn't meant to feel like my apartment with your name added to the lease."

"Noted."

We stood there a moment, both of us surveying the boxes scattered across hardwood floors that had clearly never seen a cardboard box before in their polished lives, and I felt, for the first time since signing that certificate, the full, strange weight of what we'd actually done, married that morning, moved in by afternoon, and still complete strangers by every measure that actually mattered.

We were married. And we were, for all practical purposes, still strangers.

"I should let you unpack," he said.

"Right."

He didn't move. Neither did I. The silence stretched, awkward and unfamiliar, two people who'd shared a hotel room and a wedding kiss and somehow still didn't know how to navigate standing in the same kitchen.

"There's food in the fridge," he offered. "If you're hungry. I wasn't sure what you'd want, so I had them stock a little of everything."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

He left for the study, the door clicking softly shut behind him, and I stood there a long moment in the enormous, echoing quiet of my new home, still in the dress I'd worn that morning to marry a man I barely knew, before I finally started unpacking, because it was easier than thinking about anything else.

I made myself dinner alone around eight, ate standing at the counter because sitting at the long dining table by myself felt absurd. I didn't know what he liked, or whether he'd already eaten, or whether I was supposed to check. I didn't check. I just made enough for one and told myself that was fine.

Around nine, I heard his door open down the hall, water running briefly, then quiet again. He didn't come find me. I didn't go looking for him either, though I caught myself listening for his footsteps anyway, cataloguing them without meaning to, the particular rhythm of a stranger moving through a space that was now, apparently, also mine.

By the time I climbed into an unfamiliar bed, I'd learned the shape of the evening we'd apparently both silently agreed to, separate rooms, separate meals, a kind of careful choreography neither of us had written down but both of us seemed to already know the steps to. We hadn't even discussed what to call each other in front of other people yet. Husband. Wife. The words sat strange in my mouth even unspoken.

Around eleven, a floorboard creaked outside what I assumed was his door. I lay still, listening, absurdly aware of every sound in an apartment that still felt like it belonged to someone else entirely. The creak again. A door closing softly. Then nothing.

He hadn't knocked. I told myself I was relieved.

I noticed small things over the following hour that I couldn't fall asleep through. The particular quiet way he moved, like he was trying not to disturb a house that wasn't used to two people in it yet. The fact that he'd left his study door open a crack earlier, light spilling faintly into the hallway when I'd passed it, as if some part of him didn't love the silence any more than I did, even if neither of us would admit that out loud.

We were strangers who'd just promised each other forever on paper, and neither of us even knew whether the other preferred their coffee black. I didn't know what music he listened to, or what made him laugh, or whether he slept on his back or his side. I knew the shape of his hands better than I knew almost anything else about him, and that felt like exactly the wrong thing to know first.

I was still awake turning that thought over when a noise pulled me upright, something clattering in the kitchen, loud enough to jolt my heart into my throat.

I grabbed my robe and moved down the hallway on bare feet, pulse hammering, half convinced I'd find an intruder and half convinced I was being ridiculous.

Henry was already there, standing in the dim kitchen light in nothing but pajama pants, a dropped pan at his feet, his hair disheveled in a way I'd never seen on the composed, controlled man I'd married on paper just hours earlier. He looked younger like this. Softer. Like a stranger wearing the shape of someone I was only just beginning to actually know.

"You scared me," I said, breath still uneven, hand pressed flat against my chest like it could slow my own heartbeat down.

"Sorry. Couldn't sleep. Thought I'd make tea." He bent to retrieve the pan, and when he straightened, his eyes found mine across the shadowed kitchen, and something in the air between us shifted, thinner than it had been an hour ago, thinner than it had any right to be at this particular hour.

"Couldn't sleep either?"

"No." I wrapped the robe tighter around myself, suddenly very aware of how little separated us, how quiet the apartment was beyond this one small circle of light. "First night in a strange house, I guess."

"It's not that strange. Just big." He almost smiled, the first real crack in the composed mask he'd worn all day. "Give it a week. You'll stop getting lost looking for the bathroom."

"You knew about that?"

"I heard you the first time. Didn't want to embarrass you by saying anything."

A short, surprised laugh escaped me before I could stop it. Something in his face eased at the sound, the careful distance between us thinning further without either of us moving an inch.

"For the record," I said, "I don't know what you like for breakfast either. Or dinner. Or anything, really. We're going to have to figure that out at some point."

"We will."

"Tonight apparently wasn't that point."

"No." His mouth twitched, almost a real smile this time. "Tonight was apparently tea at two in the morning and a dropped pan."

Neither of us moved.

The rules felt suddenly very far away, three pages of careful conditions I'd written myself, somehow thinner than paper deserved to be at two in the morning on our very first night under the same roof. Standing there in the dark with him, barefoot and unguarded, two strangers who'd signed their names to each other hours ago and still didn't know the first thing about one another, I wasn't entirely sure either of us remembered what those rules were, or particularly cared to.