She came up blank, and tonight she had no energy to start one. They were in their fourth year of marriage, after several years of bouncing from one rental to another before finally buying this place. What their relationship had become now was hard to name. They were two strangers living under the same roof, tied together mostly by a mortgage and a rescue dog.
Thank goodness we never had kids, Marina thought suddenly. At one point they had truly wanted a baby. For six months they had tried, talked about names, imagined a nursery. Then somehow, without ever saying it out loud, both of them cooled off. What bothered her most was that they had been sleeping in separate rooms for six months. Their primary bedroom, once put together with care and excitement, had turned into Mike’s cave.
He stayed up there late at night at his keyboard and then passed out on a stiff office daybed he’d brought in. He kept choosing that setup over coming back to their bed. Marina was a light sleeper, and even the hum of his computer drove her up the wall. So she had long since moved to the living room, falling asleep to the muffled tapping of keys from the next room.
In the mornings she got ready quietly and slipped out to work, trying not to cross paths with him. It was the kind of arrangement that made the future feel obvious, and not in a good way. Their marriage was drifting toward collapse. They had no shared routines left, no real topics of conversation, and their last vacation together felt so long ago it might as well have belonged to another couple. That evening followed the same script as always.
Dinner passed in silence, the dishes were washed, and Mike disappeared back into his office. As Marina put the leftovers away, she noticed an open bottle of red wine in the fridge door. Without thinking much about it, she poured herself a glass and drank it down in a few swallows. A pleasant drowsiness came over her, and the wine felt like a decent remedy for stress.
The tension eased. Even Mike, somewhere behind the wall, seemed less irritating. She sat in the quiet for a minute, then reached for the bottle again. She wanted to hold on to that calm a little longer. The second glass she sipped more slowly, noticing the dry, tart finish.
“Having a party by yourself?” Mike’s voice, edged with irony, caught her off guard. Chuck, who had been dozing on the floor, lifted his head at the sound of his owner’s rare appearance in the kitchen. “Just checking up on me?” Marina shot back, sliding the glass aside and feeling a small stab of guilt. Mike ignored the jab and said, “My dad’s coming on Sunday.”
Marina stared at him. “What do you mean, this Sunday?” she asked, watching him nod and pour himself some wine too. The loneliness in the room eased a little, but her anxiety rose fast. “Yeah. So you’ll need to give up the couch in the living room for him,” he said, as if the matter were settled.
Marina had never met her father-in-law, not even at her own wedding. Back then, his very busy father had said work kept him away and skipped the ceremony of his only son. Even then, Marina had figured he was the kind of man who put himself first. And now he was about to move into her already uncomfortable home.
“Why is he coming? What’s he doing here?” she asked. Mike just shrugged, as if they were discussing a package delivery. “No idea. He’s got business in the city.” Marina carefully asked why a man with money couldn’t just book a decent hotel room…
