The Distance Between

Margot found the cat dead on a Tuesday morning — the stray she'd been feeding for three years, stiff beneath the hydrangeas. She buried it with a garden trowel, her hands shaking not from grief but from something else: the sudden clarity of how much time she'd spent waiting for things to die.

David was already gone by the time she came inside, already running his usual route along the river, his obsessive five miles before work. She watched from the kitchen window as his figure receded into the morning mist, a rhythmic motion away from her, away from everything they'd built together. He'd been running for years, she realized — not just along the river but away from conversations, away from decisions, away from the question she stopped asking two years ago.

Their marriage had become something they had to bear, separately and together, like chronic pain or a persistent cough. They moved through rooms they shared as if they were guests in each other's lives, passing like ships in a hallway, saying things that meant less each time.

Margot made coffee. She sat at the table where they'd once talked until dawn, back when they still believed love was something you found rather than something you chose, daily, through small rebellions against exhaustion and disappointment.

The cat's grave was fresh under the hydrangeas. David was running along the river, putting distance between himself and whatever waited for him back home. And Margot sat with her coffee and thought about how some things don't die all at once — they just get buried gradually, inch by inch, until you wake up one Tuesday morning and realize you're kneeling in dirt, holding a garden trowel, and the person sleeping down the hall has become someone you once knew.

When David came back, sweating and flushed with the false vitality of forced exertion, she watched him bend to tie his shoes and thought: we could keep doing this. We could keep bearing it. We could keep running.

Instead she said, "I think we should stop."

He didn't ask what. He just straightened up slowly, and for the first time in years, he didn't look away.