The Invisible Wife Walks Away

Summary

My husband was a ghost who only materialized to sleep.

When I caught the flu, he was buried in deadlines. When the copper pipe beneath our kitchen sink ruptured in the dead of winter, spray soaking through the floorboards, he told me he was in a sprint review and hung up. For three years of marriage, our routine was reduced to an unwritten truce of total absence: he slipped into bed long after midnight, collapsed onto his side of the mattress, and woke up already halfway out the door.

I lived in a state of quiet, functional widowhood.