My wife started coming home after 9 p.m. with weird marks on her wrists – so I showed up at her office unannounced one evening

Behind her, two colleagues stood awkwardly, Sanjay and Amira, I think. Papers and charts were scattered across the table, a laptop still projecting data onto the wall.

She turned to them and said, her voice tight.

“Guys… can we wrap this up tomorrow morning?”

They nodded wordlessly and slipped past me.

There was only us left.

I took a step inside.

The door closed behind me, muffled by the finale, and suddenly the silence seemed unbearable.

I was very aware of my own breathing, the noise it made in the silence, as if it didn't belong in the room.

The glow of the projector casts faint graphs onto the walls, charts, acronyms for wellness measures I don't recognize. One of the graphs was red, then changed to green. It's the kind of display Nara could explain in ten seconds.

I stared at him as if he might confess something to me if I looked at him long enough.

My wife returned to the table, slowly, as if her legs had forgotten how to move naturally. She gathered some loose papers into a pile, but her hands were shaking.

Not much, just enough for me to see.

"There's orange chicken here, Jon," she said. "Sanjay ordered it."

continued on next page