Gretchen was thirty-eight and worked as a surgical nurse at a busy Minneapolis hospital. For months she’d used the excuse of exhausting shifts to avoid looking too closely at what was unraveling in her quiet Plymouth home.
Before all this, the big suburban house had always buzzed with noise and life — backpacks by the door, laundry on the line, Joshua humming over the coffee maker each morning. Now it felt like a staged show home: spotless and hollow.
Their thirteen-year-old daughter, Maxine, spent more and more nights at friends’ houses. Neither parent pressed her about it. Kids sense a coming storm long before the adults admit it’s already raining.
Joshua had climbed to a senior finance role at a large investment firm in downtown St. Paul. Since his promotion, his suits had grown pricier, his trips more frequent, his temper thinner. When he first asked for the divorce, his calm had thrown her — she’d read it as maturity.
“We just don’t make each other happy anymore,” he had told her softly one evening.
She had believed him completely at the time, chalking their marriage’s collapse up to night shifts, endless meetings, the mortgage, the daily grind.
