Darius never brought her coffee in bed. Not even during the first year of their marriage, when they were still playing at being lovebirds.
The most he’d ever do was grumble from the doorway, “Get up, I boiled the kettle.”
“Why are you up so early?” she asked, propping herself up on her elbows.
He smiled too wide, showing too many teeth.
“Oh, I slept great. I wanted to… surprise you.”
That momentary, barely perceptible pause before the word “surprise”—that’s what gave him away.
Kiana took the mug and sipped carefully. The coffee was sweet, even though she hadn’t taken sugar in her coffee in about five years.
“Thank you,” she said evenly. “It’s delicious.”
He left for the kitchen whistling something cheerful, and Kiana remained sitting there, staring out the bedroom window at the gray apartment buildings and the faint outline of downtown in the distance.
Outside, a fine October drizzle was falling—gray and tiresome, just like the anxiety growing in her chest.
At work that day in the small construction company’s accounting office on the edge of their midwestern city, she tried to focus on the numbers.
Accounting had always been a refuge for people who didn’t want to think too much about life. Columns, spreadsheets, reconciliation reports—the main thing was not to get distracted.
But her thoughts kept buzzing around her head like persistent flies.
Darius was acting strange.
Not just strange—suspicious.
He’d become overly attentive, overly caring in ways that felt completely unnatural.
It was more unsettling than if he’d simply been rude or hostile.
On Friday, he bought her flowers—a big bouquet of white and yellow blooms wrapped in crinkly cellophane, supposedly “just because.”
Kiana took the bouquet, thanked him politely, and went to find a vase in the kitchen cabinet.
Her hands were shaking slightly.
In their five years of marriage, Darius had only bought her flowers twice—once on her birthday and occasionally on Mother’s Day, though even that had been inconsistent at best.
“Do you like them?” he asked, peeking into the kitchen.
“Very much,” she replied, trimming the stems carefully with scissors. “They’re beautiful.”
He stood in the doorway with his hands shoved deep into his jeans pockets, looking at her as if he wanted to say something important, but he didn’t.
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