The kindling for our explosion was laid, piece by pathetic piece, over days of silent meals and careful coexistence. Our home became a museum of quiet hostility, where every sound—the click of a fork, the sigh of a chair—was amplified in the hollow space between us.
We were a bomb with a slow, smoldering fuse, and the air grew thick with the unmistakable, acrid smell of sulfur. My paranoia had metastasized into a full-time occupation, a shadow career that consumed every idle moment. I'd pull up the phone location app when he was fifteen minutes late, watching the little blue dot move along the highway, my heart pounding a frantic, shameful rhythm against my ribs.
I'd scroll back through our old text threads from the week after the hotel, analyzing his punctuation. Did an exclamation p
