The Things We Keep Watching

The private detective's report sat on the kitchen counter, next to a bowl of oranges that had already begun to soften in the heat. Forty pages of photographs, timestamps, notes about her movements. She'd hired a spy, though she called it a 'surveillance specialist.' The distinction felt important only to lawyers.

'You're still reading it?' Marco stood in the doorway, their dog—a nervous golden retriever named Buster—pressing against his leg. 'You paid for it. You got what you wanted.'

'I wanted to know,' she said, 'not to have it documented like evidence.'

The report detailed everything: the coffee shop visits, the long walks, the evenings she spent sitting on park benches doing nothing but watching people. The most damning entry: a Tuesday in October when she'd purchased a goldfish from a pet store, then sat in her car for forty minutes staring at the plastic bag floating in the passenger seat.

'Why a goldfish?' Marco asked. 'You don't even like pets.'

'Something about needing something that wouldn't leave,' she said. 'Something that required so little.'

He laughed, bitter and short. 'Unlike me.'

'Unlike anyone.'

The silence between them had become its own presence lately, a third roommate who dominated every conversation. They'd been married seven years, together twelve. Somewhere in that time, she'd stopped speaking her desires aloud and started expecting him to intuit them. He'd stopped trying.

A cat jumped onto the counter—one of the strays they'd started feeding last summer, now essentially theirs though neither would admit it. It nudged the bowl of oranges, sniffing.

'They're going to rot,' he said.

'I know.'

'You always buy them and never eat them.'

'I keep thinking I'll want one.'

The goldfish had died within a week. The report noted this too: her third trip to the pet store in seven days, the flush of the toilet caught on audio from outside her apartment window. The detective had been thorough. She'd paid for thoroughness.

'What now?' Marco asked. 'You prove I wasn't having an affair. What changes?'

The oranges continued their slow decay on the counter. The cat settled beside them, purring. Buster whined, sensing something in the air that neither of them could name.

'I don't know,' she said. 'I thought knowing would fix something.'

'Trust isn't verified through receipts, Elena.'

She looked at the report, at the photograph of herself looking into a pet store window, her expression unreadable even to her. 'No,' she said. 'But fear is documented through them.'

The detective had included a final note, written on a separate page: Subject appears lonely. Subject appears to be waiting for something she cannot name. Subject appears to be searching.

She'd hired someone to watch her husband and learned instead what she looked like when she thought no one was looking.