Three weeks earlier, Claire had been standing barefoot in her kitchen, reading a message on her laptop while Darren shouted from the hallway that he could not find his blue tie. That was how their marriage had sounded for years: Darren calling, Claire answering, Darren needing, Claire fixing.
She had once found it sweet. In the beginning, he had been nervous, charming, and full of big dreams he was too scared to chase alone. Claire had believed in him before anyone else did. Before their marriage, she had worked in brand strategy. She liked solving problems, finding the one sentence that made a client understand a whole campaign. She was good at it, too. Good enough that her old boss had called her “the calmest person in a burning room.”
Then her mother got sick, and life became one long emergency. Claire stepped back from work because someone had to keep everything from falling apart. Darren promised it would only be temporary. Temporary became eight years. And somehow, during those eight years, Darren forgot that Claire had ever been anything but the woman waiting at home.