The driveway looked the same when I finally pulled in,
but nothing about it felt like mine anymore. The midnight-blue Audi was still there, parked too comfortably between my wife’s sedan and the garage door like it had been assigned a place. I sat in the car for a long moment, engine idling, watching the house through the windshield as if it might reveal something before I stepped inside.
The front door opened before I reached it. Melanie stood there, arms folded, face carefully controlled. Behind her, I could hear movement—footsteps that didn’t belong to our routine, voices that didn’t belong to our history. She didn’t ask where I had been. She didn’t ask if I was safe. She simply said,
