It would be unfair to say Natalie never tried. Later that month she left a note beside my coffee cup telling me she loved me. One Sunday she made pancakes and insisted we spend the morning in the backyard instead of staring at our phones. Those moments mattered, and I remember them because I do not want the story of our marriage reduced to a simple tale about one good person and one bad person.
But a kind note on Monday did not stop her from speaking to me with contempt on Wednesday. A good morning together did not make her willing to answer basic questions about the household account. We could experience affection while avoiding everything that threatened it. By late August, I was beginning to understand that warmth and repair were not the same thing.
One evening Natalie came home with a garment bag and placed it over the back of a dining chair. She'd bought an expensive dress for an event at Halcyon, the same nightclub she'd been visiting regularly. The next morning I noticed another charge on our joint card, this one for a private car service she said the company usually covered. It was large enough that I finally asked us to review the month's expenses together.
"You make plenty of money, Randy," she said. "Why does every receipt have to become a committee meeting?"
"Because we agreed on a roof fund, and it's gone down instead of up."
"Maybe we have different ideas about what matters."
That sentence hurt because the roof wasn't my hobby. It was part of our home, and we'd stood beneath a leak the previous winter promising to fix it before the next storm season. I asked her if she still wanted the same future we'd discussed. She looked away and said she didn't know why every conversation with me had to be so serious.
After she went to bed, I opened the household spreadsheet we'd used for years. The roof fund wasn't empty, but we'd withdrawn more than we'd added in recent months. I found myself calculating what it would cost to live alone in a smaller place if we sold the house. I closed the spreadsheet before finishing because even thinking those numbers felt like turning against her.
By September, the prospect of separation no longer seemed abstract. My appetite had changed. I woke before my alarm and lay staring at the ceiling while Natalie slept beside me. At work I still did my job well, but Daniel noticed I had stopped volunteering for the weekend overtime I used to enjoy. I was tired of being physically present everywhere and emotionally absent from my own life.
On the Tuesday before the nightclub confrontation, I told Natalie that we needed to choose a time to talk without distractions. She said she was booked all week. I suggested Sunday. She rolled her eyes and asked whether I could at least make it sound less like a summons. I told her she could choose the time, but that avoiding the conversation was no longer an option for me.
She looked at me with a kind of impatient disbelief. "What exactly are you going to do if I'm busy?"