George wasn’t oblivious. He knew something was wrong. He simply didn’t know what yet. His working theory, assembled from the phone behavior and the late nights and a vague shift in how Zoe held herself in a room, was that she was unhappy—with work, with him, with something he’d failed to see.
He’d gone over the recent months looking for a point of divergence, some argument or neglect that might explain the distance, and come up mostly empty. They hadn’t been fighting. They hadn’t been, he now realized, talking all that much either. He’d been busy with a project at work. She’d been busy. They’d coasted in the way couples do when life fills in around them.
He tried to raise it once, asking if she was alright and whether there was anything she wanted to discuss with him. She’d said she was just tired, and he’d accepted it. He was, he would later think, too willing to accept it. It was easier to believe she was tired than to press harder for explanations.