Dont Open Your Eyes When Its Dark

I notice the smile first.

Not the one Derek gives me when I walk into the kitchen in my good jeans. Not the one he saves for his boss or his mother or anyone whose opinion he actually cares about. This is a different smile entirely. Smaller. Private. The kind a person makes when they think nobody is watching.

He is sitting at the dining table with his phone face-down beside his plate, and he is smiling at absolutely nothing.

"Funny meme?" I ask, setting my glass down across from him.

He looks up. The smile adjusts itself so fast it almost gives me whiplash. "What?"

"You were smiling at something."

"Was I?" He picks up his fork. "Just thinking about something from work."

I nod and cut into my chicken and say nothing else.

Here is the thing about Derek Vann that took me a while to learn. He is an excellent liar. Smooth, quick, unbothered. The kind of man who can look you dead in the eye and tell you the sky is green and almost make you question your own vision. I married him knowing he was charming. I did not realize charming and honest are not the same thing.

I watch him eat. He is relaxed. Easy. Every bit the devoted husband coming home to his wife after a long day.

His phone vibrates against the table.

He reaches for it before I can blink.

"Work again?" I ask pleasantly.

"Yeah." He does not look up. "Just the team group chat."

Gosh. The team group chat. At eight-thirty on a Tuesday evening.

I take a sip of my water and smile at my plate.

I am not smiling because everything is fine.

I am smiling because I already know it is not.

It started three weeks ago. Nothing dramatic. Nothing I could point to and say, there, that is the moment. Just a shift. The way Derek started carrying his phone everywhere, even to the bathroom. The way he started sleeping with it under his pillow instead of on the nightstand. The way his eyes would do this quick flick to the screen whenever it lit up, like a reflex he could not stop.

Little things. Tiny things. The kind of things a woman notices when she has been paying attention.

I have always been paying attention.

"I might need to go out of town next week," he says, still looking at his phone. "The Henderson project."

"How long?"

"Two, maybe three days."

"Okay," I say. "Let me know when you have the dates."

He finally looks up then, and something in his face relaxes. Like he expected a different answer. Like he was bracing for something and did not get it.

That tells me everything.

I excuse myself to wash up after dinner. I take my time at the sink, running the water longer than necessary, listening to the sounds of him in the next room. The low murmur of his voice. Not on a group chat. On a call.