What the Storm Reveals

The fedora sat on his desk, a remnant of the man I'd married twelve years ago. I stood in the doorway of his study, clutching the bottle of vitamin D supplements he'd forgotten—again.

"Forty-six and you can't remember to take your pills," I said, my voice flat. He didn't look up from the contracts spread across his mahogany workspace.

"You sound like my mother," he muttered, finally meeting my gaze. His eyes were the same brown that had undone me in that Chicago bar three years before our wedding.

I laughed bitterly. "Your mother's been dead for a decade, Marcus. I'm your wife, not your secretary."

Outside, lightning fractured the sky—a sudden, violent crack that made the windows shudder in their frames. The power flickered. His laptop screen went dark, leaving us in half-light, the stale air of our marriage suddenly illuminated.

"You used to be wild," he said suddenly, surprising me. "Remember that fox we saw in the garden? The one that kept coming back? You said it was trying to tell us something."

"I was drunk," I said. "And we both know what the fox was really after—the neighbor's garbage. Just like we were after something we couldn't name."

He stood up and reached for my hand. "Stay. The storm's getting worse."

I pulled away. "I brought your vitamins. That's what I am now—the person who brings vitamins. The person who wears sensible shoes and schedules dental appointments. The person who forgot how to be the kind of woman who catches foxes."

I left his hat on his desk. Let him explain why his wife's shoes were still in the hallway come morning.

The rain was cold on my face as I walked to the car. Somewhere in the woods behind our subdivision, I heard the sharp bark of a fox—wild, alive, utterly indifferent to us all. For the first time in years, I felt something like hope.