Dead Signals

The retirement community of Silver Pines felt like a zombie apocalypse most days—elderly residents shuffling through the halls, eyes glazed, moving with the sort of relentless, aimless determination that made Matt wonder if they'd actually died years ago and nobody had bothered to tell them. He adjusted his bluetooth earpiece, watching through the window as his wife Elena moved through her tai chi routine on the lawn below, her movements graceful and deliberate, nothing like the undead shuffle around her.

She'd been different lately. Distant. Matt's iPhone had buzzed last night with a message from an unknown number: *"She knows you're checking."* It had sent a chill through him that had nothing to do with the overzealous air conditioning in their Florida condo. He'd been tracking Elena's location since she'd started leaving their bed at 3 AM, claiming insomnia, returning with the smell of someone else's cologne and sand in her shoes.

"You used to love baseball," she'd told him once, early in their marriage, when he'd still taken her to minor league games, teaching her the statistics and strategies he'd memorized as a lonely kid in Chicago. Now she watched him from the window, her iphone in hand, thumb hovering over the screen. She was the spy now—or perhaps they'd both been spying on each other for years, just in different ways.

"Are you happy?" he asked later that evening, watching her scroll through something she quickly hid when he approached.

Elena looked up, and for the first time in months, she really saw him. "I was happy," she said softly. "Then I realized you were still playing games—just not baseball anymore. You've been tracking me like I'm some kind of suspect."

"I was scared," Matt admitted. "Scared of losing you."

"You lost me when you stopped trusting me." She set her phone on the counter between them, screen up. A message displayed: *"Your husband's surveillance app was detected. He knows."*

The zombie apocalypse had come to Silver Pines after all—just not the way anyone had expected. They were both just shuffling through the wreckage of a marriage that had died while they were still living in it.