Days bled into a week, a monotone stretch of grim coexistence. A cold war, precise and silent, settled over the house. We communicated through the minimalist poetry of notes on the fridge and terse, transactional texts.
Meeting late.
Don’t wait for dinner.
Lily’s dentist at 3.
Pick up milk.
We were co-CEOs of a failing corporation called Our Family Inc., managing the logistical downsizing of its emotional operations with sterile efficiency.
Sex was a distant country, its borders closed. Touch was a forgotten language. We moved through shared spaces with the careful, wide-berth choreography of strangers in a crowded elevator, orbiting a shared center of gravity—the children – while feeling only the repellent force field around each other.
We were roommates with a devastat
