The Storm Before Silence

The first **lightning** strike illuminated everything I'd been ignoring for six months.

I was sitting on the fire escape of my fourth-floor walk-up, my **cat** Bastet pressing against my thigh, her purr the only steady thing in a world that had come unmoored. Rain sheeted down, turning the city into a watercolor blur. Inside, my phone sat on the kitchen counter—some sleek new **iphone** David had bought me last month, back when he still remembered things like anniversaries and my preference for androids he couldn't be bothered to learn.

"You're overthinking again," my sister had said earlier that afternoon. We were at her kitchen table, surrounded by the debris of her failed marriage—the papers, the boxes, the lifetime of accumulated grievances. "David's just busy. This merger at the firm has him working eighty-hour weeks. You know how finance is."

I did know how finance was. I knew the language of it, the way conversations became transactions and people became assets and the **bull** market metaphor got applied to everything including, apparently, my marriage. What I hadn't known until two hours ago—that glowing rectangle on my counter had shown me—was that David's late nights weren't spent on quarterly reports.

Another flash of lightning, closer this time. Bastet twitched but didn't move. She was older now, fifteen and arthritic, but she still remembered the storms we'd weathered together in this apartment, through the breakup before David and the layoff after and my mother's diagnosis that turned out to be nothing, the scare that sent us all reeling.

The screen had lit up at 11:47 PM with a message meant for someone else. Three lines, unmistakable in their intimacy, complete with an address I knew belonged to a junior associate named Chloe who'd been to our apartment exactly twice, both times for firm parties where she'd laughed too loudly at David's jokes and touched his arm when she thought no one was watching.

I hadn't responded. I hadn't cried. I'd just set the phone face-down on the counter, poured myself a glass of wine I wasn't going to drink, and stepped out into the gathering storm with Bastet at my heels.

Somewhere below, a car horn blared, then another. The city was angry, indifferent, relentless. It would keep spinning tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, indifferent to whatever choice I made about David, about the apartment we'd leased together, about the carefully constructed future that had dissolved in the blue light of that screen.

Bastet shifted, her head butting against my hand. Some instinct made her demand comfort before the thunder caught up with the lightning.

"Yeah," I said, scratching behind her ears. "I know."

Inside, the phone buzzed again. David, probably. Or maybe Chloe. It didn't matter. The storm had broken, and I was still deciding whether to run for cover or stand in the rain and let it wash everything clean.