I showed Natalie a passage one night and said I thought we had fallen into something like that. She skimmed two paragraphs and asked whether I'd been researching ways to diagnose her. I told her the book described both of us, including my habit of bringing up problems after she'd had an exhausting day. She handed it back and said she didn't need a textbook to tell her how to live.
I apologized for picking a bad moment. I had become skilled at that apology. It let us end the conversation without answering why there never seemed to be a good moment. I placed the book in my nightstand beside the notebook and went downstairs to finish the laundry.
Our financial life had always been straightforward. We each earned money, deposited most of it into a joint household account, and kept smaller personal accounts for purchases we didn't need to discuss. The mortgage, insurance, groceries, retirement contributions, and home repairs came from the joint account. We had agreed years earlier to check with each other before making larger discretionary purchases from it, not because either of us required permission but because we were saving toward replacing the roof and building a more secure future.
At the beginning of summer, I was reviewing the account after a property-tax payment and noticed several unfamiliar restaurant charges. They weren't enormous individually, but they were frequent, and they appeared on evenings Natalie had described as work functions. There were also rideshare bills and two charges to a hotel near downtown. I assumed they might be reimbursable business expenses, so I asked whether Northline was supposed to cover them.
"I know how my expense reports work," she said sharply.
"I didn't say you didn't. I'm asking because they're coming from the house account."
"I'll sort it out. You don't have to audit every dinner I eat."
I looked at the bank statement in front of me. It wasn't the dinner that bothered me; it was the unfamiliar feeling that asking about money we both contributed had become an offense. I told her that, and she said I was being cheap. I remembered how we'd once celebrated saving enough to replace a broken washing machine without putting it on a credit card, and I wondered when financial teamwork had become an insult.
A week later, the hotel charge disappeared from the statement because a credit had been issued. I wanted to take that as proof she'd been right and I had worried over nothing. But there had been no apology for the way she'd spoken to me, and no invitation to discuss how we'd handle those expenses in the future. One administrative correction had replaced an actual conversation.
My friend Daniel Price noticed I wasn't sleeping well. Daniel and I had worked together at the hospital for almost a decade, long enough to know when the other was pretending a difficult situation wasn't affecting him. He found me eating lunch at my desk one afternoon and asked whether I wanted to take a walk. We ended up outside near the loading dock, where the hum of refrigeration units drowned out the distant traffic.