What the Cat Saw
Margot placed the vitamin supplement on the counter — B-complex with extra D3, the doctor's prescription for stress-induced fatigue. At forty-seven, she'd never imagined her marriage would require nutritional support just to survive the daily surveillance.
Every morning, running six miles before dawn served as both exercise and escape. The rhythm of her breath on pavement drowned out the questions she couldn't ask: Why did Thomas sleep with his phone beneath his pillow? What lay behind those encrypted files he accessed when he thought she was asleep?
She'd become what she never wanted to be: a spy in her own home.
Their cat, a silver tabby named Silas, watched from the windowsill as she returned from her run, sweat-darkened and pulse-elevated. Silas knew everything — Thomas's midnight calls, Margot's desperate checks of his browser history, the way they circled each other like strangers sharing a lease.
"You look tired," Thomas said one evening, his hand hovering near her shoulder before retracting.
"Just need my vitamins," she replied, the lie tasting familiar on her tongue.
That night, she woke to find Thomas standing over Silas, speaking in low tones she couldn't quite catch. Spy protocol or midnight confession? She couldn't tell anymore.
The breakthrough came accidentally: a dropped file, an unencrypted document that revealed everything. Thomas wasn't having an affair. He wasn't in debt or gambling their savings away.
He'd been writing her a letter. For three months. Trying to find the right words to say he felt like they were already divorced, just sharing real estate and a cat.
The next morning, Margot skipped her run. She made coffee, placed the vitamin bottle in the cabinet. Silas jumped onto her lap, purring with the certainty of a creature who'd been waiting for them to catch up to what he'd known all along.
Some marriages, she realized, don't end with explosions. They end with the quiet closing of laptop lids, the intimacy of becoming strangers, the realization that you can run six miles every morning but still end up exactly where you started: alone in a house that feels like someone else's.