The house smelled faintly of bergamot and lemon — the sort of clean, ordered scent Alden favoured, a small domestic signature he liked to leave behind after long days on television panels and patient rounds. Morning light pooled on the wooden floor in soft rectangles. The city beyond their windows moved on its indifferent orbit: delivery bikes, the distant murmur of trams, a dog barking two streets away. Inside, everything had the exact careless elegance of a life curated.
They had been married three years. In photographs on the mantel they looked like the kind of couple people envied: Mira with her quiet smile and paint-smudged cuffs, Alden with his calm, handsome jaw and the public-professor air that made strangers defer to him. He was the kind of man who could say things and make them sound inevitable — a sentence poised like a scalpel. She loved him for it, in the beginning; loved him now because the weight of his presence had folded itself into the furniture, the routines, the small rituals that made a home.
This morning, they argued about a thing they argued about like two tide-locked rocks — a predictable scraping that left both of them raw. Alden, with a patient, ironic tilt to his voice, repeated what he'd said a dozen times before: his parents had never approved of marriage for love. "They've always believed in arrangements," he said, as if reciting a policymaker's brief. "Stability. Alliances."
Mira's response came quickly, but not unkind. She watched him over the rim of her coffee cup, lips pressed thin. "Maybe they should have tried feeling something," she said. "Maybe they'd like it."
Alden's laugh was small and indulgent. He was trying to calm her; he always tried to defuse her storms. "Go ahead," he teased, the humour a balm. "Make them a list. Call them, invite them to propose a rotation of brides. I can technically—" He let the sentence hang with a mock flourish, and then, gentler, "—marry four, if that's what you mean."
It struck her like an insult and a dare. Mira felt the flash of something hot and private — the old annoyance mix with something deeper, the unnamed fear that their life could be so casually decimated by the opinions of other people. "Fine," she said, too loud for the kitchen. "Go marry one of the bitches they pick for you. See how happy you are then."
He smiled, but the smile didn't reach his eyes. "Don't be cruel," he said.
The banter should have ended there, as it usually did, dissolving into its usual, affectionate repartee. But small things are like hairline cracks in a pane of glass: under enough pressure, they spread. Alden's voice that time had a clipped edge. "That's it," he snapped before he had a chance to soften it, and left the sentence a door slamming shut between them.
He retreated to his study, the room lined with books and neat stacks of journals, where a sleep he did not trust could sometimes be faked by sinking into a chair and letting the world burn away. Mira stayed behind in the kitchen. The argument sat between them like a stubborn, unswept spill. Hours passed like that, thick and unhelpful. She made half a sandwich and didn't eat it. She turned the podcast on and off. Alden's absence was a presence of its own, humming from the other side of a closed door.
When sleep refused them both, Mira found herself moving without intention toward the study. She carried with her the small stuffed seal Alden had given her on their first anniversary — its fur slightly worn, one black button eye loose. She had kept it because it anchored her to the version of herself that could accept the ordinary comforts of love. Now she clutched it the way people clutch talismans: not believing in magic, but not wanting to risk its absence.
She hovered at the study door, the sill of it cool under her palm. Up close, the wood grain seemed impossibly fine, like the line between apology and offence. She wasn't brave enough to push the door open. Instead, she slid down and sat on the floor, back against the cold wall, the seal between her hands. Outside the study, she could hear the distant, rhythmic tapping of his fingers on a laptop, the low exhale of a man trying to unmake the night's argument on his own terms.
From within, Alden saw her shadow through the narrow slit the door made when it was slightly ajar. The silhouette was small, hunched, ridiculous in its misery. He softened. He opened the door before he could think better of it and leaned against the frame.
"What are you doing out here?" he asked, but the question held no accusation; it held concern.
Mira looked up. Her face was a map of guilt and fatigue; she felt ridiculous and childish, "looking miserable!" and for a moment ashamed of the weight of her own feelings. "I couldn't sleep," she said simply, the words the kind that invited a small, domestic rescue.
He stepped in and, uncharacteristically, left the study chair empty and stood by the table instead, hands tucked into the pockets of a blazer he hadn't bothered to take off. She remained on the floor, cross-legged, the stuffed seal in her lap like a secret.
"Okay," he said finally, as if dealing with a stubborn patient rather than his wife. "We won't discuss this again. I will talk to my parents. I will ask them not to—or to stop looking, if that's what you want."
She let out a small, incredulous laugh, the kind that means relief plus the residue of disbelief. "First of all, they won't get married," she said. "But if they did, I'd drive them away. You are doomed here, boy."
He widened his hands as though yielding a point. "I can only take one hooligan in my house. Two would be a logistical nightmare."
She blinked, then grinned despite herself. "See? There's your courage."
They rose then, the spell of their argument melting into something softer. Alden reached for her hand, and she let him. He guided her toward the kitchen. "Pick a flavor," he prompted, playful now.
Mira climbed up onto the counter — a small rebellion — and surveyed the freezer like a queen inspecting territory. "The stupidest: I hate chocolate," she declared.
He feigned a heart attack, dramatics that had been honed in countless benign domestic standoffs. "No," he intoned, collapsing theatrically against the counter. She laughed, the sound bright and surprised, and the kitchen filled with the simple warmth of two people who knew how to make each other smile.
They ate ice cream — mint for him, something improbably floral for her — and in the middle of licking sticky spoons, they made a treaty, ridiculous and earnest both: if either of them brought up marriage-or-affair accusations without proof, the offender would pay five packs of sour gummies. The penalty doubled each day until an apology was offered, the idea of "interest" on resentment making them both snort with laughter.
They finished the ice cream, rinsed the spoons, and in the soft, slow close of the evening, they undressed and found each other in the dark. It was the ordinary kind of intimacy that felt like medicine, bodies aligning into the familiar geography of comfort. Afterwards, spent and unsteady, they fell asleep as two people who still believed, for the moment, in the small, perfect life they had made together.
Outside, the city spun on, oblivious, but inside the house, a hairline crack had been crossed, and the faint, almost imperceptible sound of it settling into something new had already begun.