Chapter 1
The coffee machine hisses at exactly 6:45, the way it has for five years, and I know without looking that Julian is already dressed, already scrolling through something on his phone with the particular stillness he gets when he doesn't want to be interrupted.
"Morning," he says, not looking up.
"Morning."
I pour two cups because that's the rhythm of us now — two cups, two spoons, the sugar in his and not in mine, a kitchen that runs on muscle memory instead of conversation. I used to think that was intimacy. Maybe it still is. Maybe intimacy is just what's left after you've said everything else there is to say.
The radio is on low, tuned to the station Julian likes, the one that plays soft rock from decades I wasn't alive for. I'm reaching past it to turn up the volume on the kettle when four notes slide out of the speaker and stop me completely.
It's not my song. It's not even close to my song. But it's in the same key I used to write in, that particular minor-to-major lift I used every time I wanted a chorus to feel like relief, and for exactly as long as it takes to pour milk into a cup, I am not standing in this kitchen. I am standing under lights so hot I could feel them on the back of my neck, holding a microphone that weighed nothing and everything, watching a few thousand strangers become, briefly, mine.
Then the moment passes, the way it always does, and I am thirty-four years old in a kitchen in a house I chose with a man I chose, waiting for coffee.
"You okay?" Julian asks. He's finally looking up.
"Fine. Just tired."
It isn't a lie, exactly. Tired is easier to say than I heard four notes on the radio and disappeared for a second into a life I gave up on purpose. Tired doesn't require an explanation. Tired doesn't make him feel like he has to ask if I regret it — the leaving, the staying, any of it — and I don't, not really, not in the way that would mean something was wrong. I just miss it sometimes, the way you might miss a country you loved visiting but would never choose to live in again.
He kisses the top of my head on his way to the door, the same spot every time, like he's stamping something. "Dinner tonight? I'll be late-ish. Client thing."
"Sure. Text me when you're leaving."
"Love you."
"Love you too."
The door closes. The house exhales into silence, and I stand at the counter a moment longer than I need to, looking at nothing in particular.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Later, after I've answered emails for a freelance client and folded a week's worth of laundry and stared at the calendar on the fridge — the little red circle around *ovulation window*, drawn in my own handwriting like a hopeful, slightly desperate ritual — I go looking for a phone charger in the hall closet and find, instead, the guitar case.
It's been years since I opened it. I don't examine why I know exactly how it feels holding it.
I don't take it out. I just look at it, black and scuffed at the corners, a sticker from a festival half peeled off the side, and I think about the version of myself who packed it away thinking *for now* and somehow made that stretch into *forever* without ever deciding to.
Nobody made me quit. That's the part people get wrong when they hear the shorthand version of my life — *she gave up her career for her husband* — like he stood in a doorway with his arms crossed and made me choose. It wasn't like that. It was quieter. It was a tour I postponed for our wedding, and then a second album I put off because we were trying to build a company, and then trying to get pregnant, and somewhere in the postponing, the postponing became the plan. I chose it every time, in small pieces, until one day the choosing stopped and the not-doing-it just became who I was.
I close the closet door.
---
Dana calls while I'm making dinner for one, phone wedged against my shoulder, half-listening to her talk about a client meeting that ran long.
"You sound weird," she says, cutting herself off mid-sentence. "What's wrong?"
"Says someone who is been gone for like forever..."
"Sorry friend busy schedule , we'll talk soon but are you alright?"
" Yeah its ...nothing's wrong. It's just weird ...i heard a song today that reminded me of — before. That's all."
"Before Julian, or before you stopped touring?"
"Same thing, basically."
There's a pause on the line, the kind Dana does on purpose, the kind that's meant to make room for whatever I'm not saying. She's done this for years — leaves a silence just long enough that I either fill it with the truth or with something so obviously not the truth that she knows to let it go. Tonight I let it sit there, unfilled, and she doesn't push.
"How's the trying going?" she asks instead, gentler now.
"Its been siix months and nothing yet. I took a pregnancytest this morning hoping to see the two lines but..."
"That's still early, Maya."
"I know." I do know. I also know that knowing doesn't make the calendar on my fridge feel less like a countdown to something I'm failing at.
"And Julian?" Dana asks, and there's a specific weight on his name, the same weight it's had for over a year now, ever since she first said, carefully, over wine, *I don't like how he talks to you sometimes.* I didn't ask her to elaborate then, and I won't ask now. I've learned to hear the question underneath the question — *are you sure he's where he says he is, are you sure this is what it looks like from the outside* — and I've learned to answer only the version of it I can stand to answer.
"He's fine. Busy. Client dinner tonight."
"Okay," she says, and I can hear her deciding not to say more, which somehow says more than if she had.
After we hang up, I eat alone at the kitchen island, the radio still playing low, and when another almost-familiar song comes on, I don't turn it up and I don't turn it off. I just let it play, sitting there in the middle of it, in the middle of my own life, waiting for Julian's text to say he's on his way home.
It comes at 9:40. *Leaving now. Love you.*
I text back a heart, and I mean it, and that's the part that will make everything after this so much harder to carry — that right up until the moment it all breaks open, I still meant it.
