“Have we?”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Act like you don’t understand what I’m talking about.”
Cole leaned against the counter.
He had spent years learning that the loudest person in a room wasn’t necessarily the most dangerous. He had also learned that the person who remained calm wasn’t necessarily the person who felt nothing.
But Claire had never learned to read his silence.
“You come home from work,” she continued. “You eat dinner. You sit in front of the television. You go to bed. Every weekend is the same. Every conversation is the same.”
“I work hard so we can pay our bills.”
“That’s not a marriage!”
The words echoed through the kitchen.
Cole looked toward the family photographs on the wall. There was one from their tenth anniversary, another from a beach vacation, and a third from the Christmas when Claire had surprised him with a watch.
He wondered when those memories had stopped meaning the same thing to both of them.
