What the Future Holds

Marcus pressed his palm against the cold glass of the patio door, watching the golden retriever—Sarah's dog, technically—chase leaves across the backyard. The vitamin supplement bottle on the kitchen counter caught the morning light, its cheerful orange label mocking him with promises of vitality, of more time, of futures that might not exist anymore.

"You're doing it again," Sarah said from behind him. She'd developed an uncanny ability to read his silences over twelve years of marriage. "That thing where you disappear inside your head."

Marcus turned. She stood in her bathrobe, hair uncombed, holding her morning smoothie with the precision of someone performing a necessary ritual. "Just thinking."

"About what?" She knew, of course. She always knew.

"About how we became people who need vitamins to feel okay." He gestured vaguely at the counter. "About how Buster has more joy in one tail wag than we've had in six months."

Sarah set down her glass. The dog scratched at the glass door, wanting in, wanting out, wanting something uncomplicated. "The vitamins are because you had that scare last year. The doctor said—"

"I know what the doctor said." Marcus ran his hand through his hair, grayer now than in their wedding photos. "But sometimes I wonder if that's all we are anymore. Just maintenance. Just trying not to break down."

Sarah crossed the room and took his hand—palm to palm, the way they used to do before life accumulated between them like sediment. "We could go away,"

she said quietly. "Remember that palm reader in New Orleans? What she said about choices?"

Marcus remembered. The woman had told them that every marriage contains the seeds of its own salvation or destruction, and that the difference is often just the courage to act. "She also said we'd have two children, Sarah."

"People get things wrong." She squeezed his hand. "But she was right about the choice part."

Outside, the dog had given up on the door and curled in a patch of sunlight, entirely content with the present moment. Marcus watched the animal's peaceful breathing and felt something crack open in his chest—not fixed, exactly, but maybe no longer frozen.

"Let's sell the house," he said, the words foreign and terrifying on his tongue. "Let's go somewhere we don't need schedules. Where we don't know what happens next."

Sarah's answering smile was small but genuine, the first he'd seen in months. "I was hoping you'd say that."

The vitamin bottle sat forgotten on the counter as they began making plans, and somewhere in the distance, the future finally felt like something they might inhabit together again.