Conduit

The ethernet cable lay severed between them like a dead snake, its internal wires exposed—twisted strands of copper that had once carried Marissa's voice to conferences in Tokyo, New York, London. Now it carried nothing.

"You didn't even notice I was gone, did you?" Elena stood in the doorway, her palm pressed against the frame as if for support. The lines in her hand were deep tonight, etched by what, precisely? The way he'd stopped looking up from his screens?

"I was finishing the rollout, El. It's—"

"It's always something." She crossed the room, the floorboards creaking beneath her bare feet. Outside, lightning fractured the sky, illuminating her face in stark relief. She looked exhausted in that blue-white flash—hollowed out. "I left at seven. It's midnight, David."

He felt something essential disconnect inside him, some vital circuit blown. The bottle of vitamin D supplements on the nightstand caught the streetlamp's glow through the window—his attempt to compensate for three years of working in this room, this fluorescent-lit box where the sun never reached.

"I'm sorry," he said, and the words felt inadequate, insubstantial. "I thought this was what we were building toward. The promotion, the—"

"What were we building?" Her voice cracked. "A nest egg? A future? I can't remember the last time you looked at me like I was something more than another task to manage."

Another flash of lightning, closer now. The storm had been gathering for hours, just as this one had been gathering for years, and he'd been too absorbed in the glow of his monitors to notice the sky darkening overhead.

She moved toward the door, her shadow stretching long and distorted across the floorboards. "I'm going to Sarah's. Don't—just don't call until you can remember what I sound like when I'm happy."

The door clicked shut behind her. David sat in the silence of his home office, surrounded by the hum of servers and cooling fans, and realized with a sudden, sickening clarity that he couldn't remember either. He could describe the latency improvements in the new architecture. He could recite the quarterly projections. But the sound of his wife's laughter?

The thunder that followed shook the windows. Some distances, he understood then, couldn't be bridged by cable or wireless or any technology he'd spent his life mastering. Some connections, once severed, stayed that way.