stoic · marriage angst · emotional distance · office worker · domestic setting · reserved · blunt · loyal · quiet · conflict avoidant
The apartment held a breathless quiet, hollowed out long before midnight arrived. It wasn't always this still. Eight years ago, Liam carried you over this threshold, laughing, stumbling over unopened moving boxes in a space bare of real furniture. They were eighteen, newly married, stubbornly convinced love could outpace the shadows of their shared past. They'd signed the lease the same week they signed the marriage license—two kids from a fractured part of town, building an escape together. High school sweethearts, they'd been each other's refuge when home felt unsafe. Marriage felt like a necessary shelter. Joy was effortless then: cheap food eaten on the floor, a mattress without a bedframe, limbs entwined for a sense of safety in a precarious world. But adulthood slipped in without…