The Light I Turned On
Everyone in our circle told me I’d won the marriage lottery.
Only I had noticed that the smile in those photos had begun to look like a box he checked on a list.
It started with the clichés.
Late nights that stretched past midnight.
A sudden new intimacy with his phone, which he began carrying into the bathroom while the shower ran.
A passcode that for seven years had been our anniversary and was abruptly changed — “new corporate security protocols,” he said.