Under Surveillance

The first gray hair appeared on my thirty-fifth birthday, springing from my temple like a cruel party favor. I pulled it, but another came in its place, then another. Soon I stopped looking in mirrors.

That was also the month Mara became a spy.

I don't mean she took up with foreign intelligence. She took up with my phone. My laptop. The GPS in my car. She'd started leaving for work earlier, coming home later, her eyes sliding away from mine when I asked about her day. Then I noticed—my browser history, cleared. My sent emails, read. The subtle repositioning of objects on my desk, like someone checking for dust that shouldn't be there.

She was investigating me. Collecting evidence of a crime I hadn't committed, building a case against a husband who'd simply grown quiet.

The bull in all this? That would be me, stubborn as the animal, refusing to ask the obvious question: *Why?* Why did she think I was cheating? Why did she need to surveil a man who came home every night by seven, whose only secrets were the surprise anniversary gifts he stopped planning years ago?

Instead, I retreated. We both did.

Our backyard pool, once the site of drunken summer parties and lazy Sunday mornings, sat stagnant. I'd catch the neighbor's cat drinking from it sometimes—a ginger tom with one ear who'd stare at me through the fence, judging my cowardice.

"Are you having an affair?" I finally asked, the question bursting out of me like it had been pressurized for years.

Mara looked up from her phone—*my* old phone, actually, the one I'd upgraded last year. She was using it now. She'd cloned my data. The realization hit me like cold water.

"No," she said. "Are you?"

"No."

"Then why," her voice broke, "have you been checking out of us for three years?"

I saw it then. The spying wasn't about infidelity. It was a desperate plea for attention, a way to feel close to me when I'd become emotionally absentee. She'd been trying to find *me* in the data of my life because the actual me had disappeared.

The cat yowled somewhere in the distance.

I went to her. I don't remember who moved first. But I remember her hair, dark and silver both, against my shoulder as we sat on the kitchen floor and finally, finally talked.