The Things We Don't Say

The cat sat on the windowsill, watching us with that indifferent judgment only cats can muster. Elena and I hadn't spoken in three days, not since the night I came home to find her packing boxes she'd spent months accumulating without my notice.

"Baseball's on," I said, nodding toward the television where some team I didn't care about was losing. She didn't turn from her coffee.

"I met someone at padel," she said, the words dropping like stones into already deep water. "At the club. We've been playing together on Tuesdays. For months."

The air in our kitchen thickened. I thought about all those Tuesday evenings when she'd come home flushed from exercise, her skin radiating that particular post-exertion glow I'd foolishly attributed to the sport itself.

"His name is Marcus," she continued, not looking at me. "He's a divorce attorney. He says I should've left years ago."

I stared at my hands, at the palm where my lifeline disappeared into nothingness—those years I'd spent believing in forever now feeling like a particularly cruel joke. Somewhere, a baseball commentator's voice swelled with fake enthusiasm about a home run that would change everything. Nothing changes everything. Things just erode, gradually, until one morning you wake up beside a stranger.

"Did you sleep with him?" The question felt like something a child would ask.

"What difference does it make?" Elena stood up, her chair scraping the floor. The cat finally looked away, bored by human tragedy. "The emotional infidelity happened long before anything physical. You know this. We both do."

And she was right. We'd been ghosts haunting the same bed for years, two people who'd forgotten how to be seen by each other. Now the cat watched me alone as I poured another cup of coffee and wondered what it said about me that I still wanted her to stay.