The week before our argument, Biscuit woke me at two in the morning and I found Celeste in the living room, smiling at her phone. She startled when I stepped into the doorway, then told me she was answering a message from Briana. I offered to make tea because I was awake anyway. She said she had an early meeting and needed to finish something, then turned the screen facedown on the cushion beside her. I went back to bed with the uneasy feeling that the apartment had grown larger and emptier while its walls had stayed the same.
I didn't know the name Tulum was already attached to a reservation then. I didn't know Briana had been used as cover for other evenings, or that the money we had spent four years putting aside was being treated like a private travel allowance. I knew only that I was tired, that Celeste said I worked too much, and that the distance between us kept widening despite our sharing a bedroom. The Tuesday she announced the trip was the night those separate pieces finally became impossible to ignore.
The trouble began at a supermarket across town, which was fitting in a way I didn't appreciate until later. A failing compressor had taken down an entire row of freezer cases, and the manager was watching ice cream soften while customers pretended not to see the plastic barriers across the aisle. I spent most of the afternoon inside a cramped mechanical room with an apprentice named Luis, tracing an intermittent electrical fault through a panel that had been repaired badly more than once. Every time we thought the system was stable, a relay clicked and the pressure changed in a way it shouldn't have. By the time we found the damaged connection and brought the cases back to temperature, I had missed dinner by two hours.
It was after eight when I parked the van outside our rental. Biscuit barked once from the window, then spun in circles as I unlocked the door. I smelled like metal, old insulation, coolant residue, and the sweet burned odor that clings to overheated electrical parts. Celeste was sitting on the couch with her laptop open and a glass of wine on the coffee table. She didn't ask how the repair had gone, and that didn't bother me until I remembered how easily I would have answered if she'd asked.
"Briana and I are going to Tulum next Thursday through Sunday," she said without looking away from the screen. "Already booked." I set my keys beside the fruit bowl and waited for the rest of the information, assuming she meant a vacation they'd been discussing and hadn't finalized. There was no rest. Biscuit pressed his nose against my knee, and I scratched behind his ears while I worked out what to ask first.
"How much is it?" I said. Celeste made a small impatient sound and clicked something on her laptop.
"Not much. Four thousand, give or take." She said it as casually as somebody might describe the cost of an oil change. Four thousand dollars was nearly five months of the transfers I made to our house fund, and I hadn't known we were considering spending it.
"Which card did you use?" I asked. "The joint checking account isn't carrying that much after rent." She looked up with an expression I had come to recognize, half surprise and half irritation that I was making her explain something she considered finished.
"I took it from the house fund, Owen. Relax. We'll put it back." She turned back toward her screen as if the words had settled the matter.