The Loose Cable

Elena had stopped swimming three months ago when the insomnia began. Now she lay in bed at 3 AM, Marcus beside her breathing in that rhythmic way that made her want to scream, watching the ceiling fan spin and wondering why she'd started noticing all the small wrongnesses.

The hat on his bedside table—a beaten-up thing she'd bought him in Barcelona, now somehow always positioned with its brim facing precisely north. The way his phone never buzzed anymore, not even the work emails that used to plague their dinner conversations. And yesterday, the cable.

She'd been working from home when her internet dropped. Under the desk, where their cables tangled like dead snakes, she'd found it: a splitter she'd never bought, a second ethernet cable running dark and silent toward the wall, toward somewhere not their apartment.

Running her fingers along that cable had felt obscene, like touching something intimate she wasn't meant to see. She'd traced it to a junction box in the hallway, then stopped herself.

Marcus claimed he was in logistics. He'd always been cagey about specifics—proprietary systems, client confidentiality, the usual corporate bullshit. But standing in that hallway with her hand on the cold wall, Elena had understood what he actually did.

The corporate dinner last month came back to her in fragments: his colleague's wife mentioning Marcus's recent promotion, the way Marcus had squeezed her hand too hard under the table, his boss saying something about how Marcus had 'a nose for people's secrets' that Elena had laughed off then.

She was still lying there at dawn when Marcus's alarm chimed. He woke instantly, sitting up and reaching for his hat with practiced motion, not noticing that she'd turned it slightly east during the night.

'You okay?' he asked, and his voice sounded like someone else's. 'You look tired.'

Elena thought about the cable. About how easy it would be to follow it, to see where it led. About how she'd once loved that he seemed to know everything about her before she said it—the way he anticipated her needs, finished her sentences, knew which fears kept her up at night.

'I'm fine,' she said, and for the first time in twelve years, she believed the lie more than the truth. 'Just thinking I might start swimming again.'