Chapter 2-The silence after

Anita pov

Donald did not say a word on the way home.

Not when we collected our coats. Not when he opened the car door with the quiet efficiency

of a man performing a task he had stopped thinking about. Not when he drove us through a

city that kept sliding past my window in long streaks of orange and gold.

He drove. I watched the light. Neither of us spoke.

Donald's silence was never empty. It had weight. He never needed words to make you feel

something — he needed stillness, and enough time, and eventually you felt everything he

wanted you to feel without him saying a thing.

I felt it the whole way home.

Inside, the kitchen.

I poured a glass of water I did not drink. Upstairs the shower ran, then stopped. His footsteps

crossed the bedroom. The lamp clicked off.

No questions. No conversation. Just water, and then silence, and then nothing.

I went up. Changed in the dark. Lay down beside him and stared at the ceiling while his

breathing slowed and evened out.

My phone was face down on the nightstand.

I told myself I was not going to look at it.

I held that for about four minutes.

★

One notification.

Unknown number. Sent forty minutes ago.

You still smoke the same brand.

I stared at it until I forgot to breathe.

I knew before I typed back. I knew, and I typed anyway.

Me: Who is this.

The reply came in under a minute.

Unknown: Someone who noticed.

Me: Kelvin.

Kelvin: How did you know it was me.

Me: Because no one else would text me about cigarettes at midnight.

Kelvin: Fair enough. Do you want to get the number question out of the way first.

Me: Where did you get my number.

Kelvin: That stays where it came from.

Me: That is not an answer.

Kelvin: No. It isn't.

I lay there in the dark with the phone above my face. Donald's breathing stayed even behind

me. The same ceiling. The same dark. The same man behind me.

Nothing was the same.

The three dots appeared. He was typing. Then they stopped. Then started again.

Kelvin: How are you, Anita. Actually. How are you.

I read it once. I read it again.

I put the phone down and stared at the ceiling and my throat closed in a way I was not ready

for.

Nobody had asked me that. Not like that. Not with the actually in it, like the performed

answer was not what he was after.

Four years of silence in the car. The wrong coffee every morning. The sketchbooks in their

box. Four years of being very fine, very composed, very capable of performing a version of

myself that was correct in every way that mattered to everyone except me.

And Kelvin Rae texts me at midnight and asks how I actually am.

I told myself no.

I reached for the phone anyway.

I did not answer the message. I just held it. Lay there on my side with Donald breathing

behind me, unbothered, like nothing in the world had shifted at all.

★

I did not sleep.

I lay there until the dark outside softened. Black to grey. Grey to the pale white of a morning

that does not care what the night before contained.

When my phone lit up, I already knew.

Kelvin: Good morning, Anita.

I looked at it for a long time.

My thumb hovered over the screen. I told myself I would put it down.

I did not put it down.

I opened a new message to him instead. Typed three words. Deleted them. Typed them again.

Then Donald's alarm went off.

I locked the screen and set the phone face down and lay very still while he reached over me to

silence it.

His hand grazed my arm on the way back.

He did not notice.

I did.