What We Carry

The lightning storm broke just as Marcus reached the front door, illuminating the split in the sidewalk where the fox had been digging all week. He stood there for a moment, letting the rain soak through his jacket, feeling strangely relieved to be delayed. Inside, Sarah would be waiting with that particular expression he'd come to dread—the one that asked, without words, whether he'd remembered to pick up his life on the way home.

They'd eaten spinach salad for dinner three nights running, part of her new cleanse, though Marcus suspected it was punishment for something unsaid. She'd been moving through the house like a ghost these past months, her presence increasingly theoretical. He sometimes wondered if grief had turned them both into something else—not the living dead exactly, but something adjacent. Zombies of their former selves, going through the motions with hollowed-out eyes.

The bear had been hers—a stuffed toy from childhood, its fur matted and one eye missing, perched on their dresser like a witness to twelve years of marriage. After the miscarriage, she'd started talking to it late at night. Marcus would lie beside her, pretending to sleep, listening to her whispered conferences with the bear, feeling himself become unnecessary in ways that had nothing to do with utility.

"You're back," she said when he finally entered. The spinach glistened on their plates, arranged with forensic precision. "I made extra."

"I saw the fox again," Marcus said, sitting down. "It's getting bold."

"Everything's getting bold these days." She picked at her salad. "I was thinking—maybe we should sell the house. Start over."

Outside, lightning fractured the sky again, and in that flash, Marcus saw her face clearly: the exhaustion, the deliberate neutrality, the way her hand rested near the bear as if for protection. Something cracked open in his chest.

"No," he said, surprising himself. "We stay. We fix what's broken."

She looked up, really looked at him for the first time in months. "Even if it hurts?"

"Especially then."