Chapter 1 – The Trip I Wasn’t Invited On
Thursday night, I sat at the kitchen island with a mug of tea that had gone cold an hour ago and I still hadn’t noticed.
Upstairs, Grant’s suitcase zipper kept going — open, shut, open, shut — like he was double-checking something he didn’t want me to ask about.
Our house had that specific kind of silence that settles into a marriage once both people have stopped trying to fix it.
I’d been keeping count without meaning to. Four years since we’d taken a vacation together. Three anniversaries in a row he’d “had to work late.” And somehow, in the last twelve months alone, he’d found time for seven separate fishing weekends with his friends.
He came down the stairs whistling, actually whistling, and grabbed his phone charger off the counter.
“Mom and Dad are picking me up at six-thirty,” he said, breezing past me like he was announcing the weather. “Flight’s at nine.”
I set my mug down slow and careful. “Picking you up for what?”
“Florida. I told you about this last week.”
I almost laughed, because it had to be a joke. He had told me nothing last week.
“Okay,” I said. “So when do we leave?”
He opened a drawer and started digging through it, not looking at me. “You’re not coming, Erin.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s a family trip. Just me and my folks.” He shrugged, eyes still on the drawer. “Marriage doesn’t mean we have to take every vacation together.”
I kept my voice level. I’d gotten frighteningly good at that over the years.
“Right. Of course.”
He glanced up at me then, just for a second, and I caught it — that flash of relief crossing his face. He’d expected a fight. He hadn’t gotten one. Again.
“Glad you get it,” he said, and went back upstairs.
I sat there a long time after he left the room. Then I picked up my phone and pulled up my sister Nora’s name without deciding to.
Nora had always been the loud one, the one who texted me play-by-plays of her grocery store run because she thought it was funny. Lately she’d gone quiet. Canceled two Sunday dinners in a row. Kept saying she had “something going on at work” she couldn’t talk about yet.
My thumb hovered over the call button. I didn’t press it.
That night I lay next to Grant and listened to him breathe, slow and even, the sleep of a man with nothing on his conscience. He hadn’t breathed like that in years.
It felt like walking into a room and knowing, without being able to prove it, that every piece of furniture had been shifted an inch while you weren’t looking.
Morning came pale through the blinds. I made coffee, made toast, zipped his second bag shut because he could never find the stupid loop on the zipper pull.
“You’re the best,” he said at the door, duffel over his shoulder. “I’ll call tonight.”
“Have fun with your mom,” I said.
“Always do.”
