It is frightening how quickly your mind can open old drawers in a moment like that. Not just what is happening, but what has been happening. A delayed answer here. A late meeting there. The smell of perfume I didn’t wear on the collar of his shirt two Thursdays earlier. The way he had stopped asking how my day was, as if curiosity were now a luxury he reserved for people he still planned to keep. The months of conversations that ended before they began. The new private smile at texts he angled away from me. The careful blankness when I tried to ask if something was wrong.
I had not wanted to see it because seeing it meant naming it, and naming it would have made it real before I was ready. Women can live inside that denial longer than they should because society teaches us to call it patience. To call it grace. To call it being low-maintenance, understanding, mature.
But denial has a smell. It smells like coffee gone cold in your own kitchen while your husband tells you, in front of your child, that he has already dismantled your life on paper.
Lily came around the table and pressed herself against my side.
I put one hand on her hair.
“When are you leaving?” I heard myself ask.