Dead Things We Keep

Elena stood before the bathroom mirror at 2 AM, pulling another gray hair from her temple. Thirty-seven years old and already coming apart at the follicles. Marcus slept down the hall, or pretended to—he'd been doing that a lot lately. The silence between them had grown so thick she felt she could slice it and serve it on toast.

She'd made his favorite spinach salad for dinner, arranged the baby leaves with surgical precision, the way he liked. He'd pushed it around his plate without meeting her eyes, then mumbled something about working late and disappeared into his study. The spinach had wilted on the counter, a martyr to his indifference.

Now she padded barefoot through the dark house, her ghost in her own marriage. The study door was cracked open. The blue glow of his monitor painted his face in hollows.

"Marcus?"

He didn't turn. His fingers moved across the keyboard in that familiar rhythm—emails, spreadsheets, the endless documentation of a life that was happening somewhere else, to someone else.

"Remember when we used to talk?" she asked the back of his head. "Like actually talk. About things that mattered."

"I'm busy, El."

"You're always busy. You're like a zombie, Marcus. You're here, but you're not here."

He laughed, dry and humorless. "A zombie? At least they have an excuse. They're dead. I'm just... trying to keep us alive."

"Are we?" She touched her hair again, the gray strand between her fingers like a filament of truth. "Because I buried us three years ago and you haven't noticed the grave."

The typing stopped. For the first time in months, he turned his chair around. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair thinning at the crown—her husband, aging beside her while she watched from the passenger seat.

"What do you want me to say?"

"That you miss me. That you miss us. That this—" she gestured at the house, the life, the spinach wilting in the refrigerator "—isn't enough anymore."

Marcus stood up slowly. He looked exhausted, stripped raw. "I miss you every day, Elena. I miss who we were. But I don't know how to find our way back."

The air between them shifted. Something cracked open.

"Start with the spinach," she said softly. "It's your favorite. Let me make you a plate."

He nodded, and for the first time in three years, the zombie in the study reached for his wife's hand.