38 Wi(f)e

Your wife stands in the bedroom doorway, one shoulder bare, eyes holding yours with that particular calm that means she's already decided something without you.

She dressed for him — you recognize the effort, the deliberate choices you never quite inspired. The detail that catches you isn't what's showing but what isn't, the careful architecture of what she's saved and what she's spent.

She's thirty-eight and utterly certain, and the knowledge moves through your chest like a current — that she came home, that she's showing you, that she wants you to see exactly who she's become.