Daniel's POV
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Daniel stared at the closed front door for a long time.
The sound of it shutting was still ringing in his ears. Not a slam — that would have made more sense. A slam meant emotion, meant heat, meant he could work with it. He knew how to handle Mara when she was emotional. He knew how to soften his voice, how to touch her shoulder just right, how to make her feel heard until she talked herself back down.
But she hadn't slammed the door.
She had closed it quietly, the way you close something you're done with.
He picked up his coffee and found his hand wasn't quite steady.
He put it down.
He walked to the window and looked out at the street below. A few people were already moving around — a woman walking a dog, a delivery truck idling at the corner, the city warming up for another ordinary Thursday morning. Everything out there looked completely normal.
Inside this apartment, nothing was normal.
I've already called a lawyer.
He kept hearing it in her voice. Not angry. Not tearful. Just flat and certain, like she was reading a fact out loud. Like she'd been holding that sentence in her mouth for weeks and was simply ready to say it now.
He had known Mara for six years. He had been married to her for four. He knew her schedule, her habits, her tells. He knew that when she was upset she cleaned things. He knew that when she was scared she got very quiet. He knew that when she was overwhelmed she made lists.
She had been making a list this morning.
He hadn't thought anything of it at the time. Mara always made lists. But now he walked back to the kitchen table and looked at the notepad she'd left behind — she'd taken the pages she wrote on, torn them clean out, but the impression of her pen was still visible on the blank page underneath.
He tilted it toward the light.
He could make out a few words. Numbers. What looked like an address on the east side of the city. A name he didn't recognize — Priya Okafor. And below that, circled twice, one word:
DIVORCE.
His jaw tightened.
She had planned this. This wasn't a breakdown. This wasn't an impulse decision made at seven in the morning after a bad dream. She had planned this, and he hadn't seen it coming, and that bothered him more than anything else.
Daniel was good at reading people. It was his best skill — better than his work skills, better than anything else he'd ever developed. He could walk into a room and within ten minutes know who was confident and who was pretending, who could be flattered and who needed to feel powerful, who was the real decision-maker and who just thought they were. It had served him well his entire life.
He had never once thought to read Mara, because he had assumed she was simple.
Not stupid — he wasn't a fool, he knew she was brilliant. But emotionally simple. Trusting. Grateful. The kind of person who believed the best about people because they themselves had nothing to hide.
He had built his entire understanding of her on that assumption.
Standing in the kitchen with her notepad in his hand, he understood for the first time that he might have been wrong.
He pulled out his phone and called her number.
It rang four times. Voicemail.
He tried again. Same thing.
He put the phone on the counter and looked at it. The calm he usually carried so easily was harder to find this morning. There was something off about all of this — not just the divorce, not just the lawyer. It was the way she'd looked at him. Like she was studying him. Like she was looking for something specific in his face and finding exactly what she expected.
Like she already knew something she shouldn't know.
He shook his head. That didn't make sense. There was nothing to know. He hadn't done anything yet. Everything that happened — the trouble with the shelter, the council, all of it — that was months away. Things he hadn't even planned yet. Things that existed only as small, uncomfortable feelings he hadn't fully named.
He was getting ahead of himself.
She was upset. She was stressed. Mara worked brutal hours and carried everyone else's weight and never asked for help — it made sense that she'd hit a wall. The divorce thing was dramatic but it wasn't irreversible. People filed papers all the time and then pulled back. He just had to be patient and let her cool down.
He would give her today.
He picked up his coffee again, sipped it, and started mentally listing the people he'd need to talk to. Her friend Sasha — Sasha always knew how Mara was feeling before Mara said it out loud. He could call Sasha, get a sense of how serious this was. Sasha would help. Sasha understood how important it was that things stayed stable.
He was already feeling calmer.
Then his phone buzzed on the counter.
He looked down.
A news alert. Local. Something about an incident at Creston General Hospital — a patient in the overnight ward who had to be restrained after a strange episode. The details were vague, the kind of weird medical story that made the local news on slow days.
He almost scrolled past it.
But one line in the alert caught his eye and held it.
Witnesses report the patient showed no response to pain and appeared unaware that he had stopped breathing for an estimated two minutes before regaining consciousness on his own.
Daniel read it twice.
It was probably nothing. A bizarre medical case, a reporter exaggerating details, the kind of story that got clicks and meant nothing.
But the hospital named in the alert was Eastside General.
The same address that had been pressed into Mara's notepad.
He set the phone down very carefully.
Mara had written that address before the news alert existed.
She had written it this morning, before seven AM, before anyone was reporting anything.
He stood in the kitchen of his empty apartment and felt the first real edge of something he almost never felt.
He felt afraid.
Not of Mara.
Of how much she might already know.