Annaliese didn’t cover the chicken.

That was the point.

She had done everything right. She stood at the meat counter longer than necessary, scanning the trays, looking for the right chicken—not too small, skin intact. She asked questions. Organic. Air-chilled. She wanted something that could hold heat without falling apart.

She’d seen the recipe on TikTok that morning. The woman’s voice had been calm, reassuring. This one always brings them back to the table, she’d said.

Annaliese wanted that. The table. Them.

She bought everything. Real butter. Fresh herbs. Lemons heavy in her palm. Chicken stock she didn’t normally splurge on. She imagined Ben walking in. Candlelight. Something warm and tender he could sink his teeth into that wasn’t a question or a complaint.

At home, she marinated the chicken early. She let it soak all afternoon in butter, smoked paprika, lemon juice, and stock. She turned it once. Then again. Let it absorb.

When it was time, she stuffed the cavity with onion, lemon, smashed garlic. Fresh thyme. Rosemary snapped from the stem. She baked it exactly the way the TikTok woman said to. Twenty minutes per pound.

She checked the temperature—dead center. Perfect. Juices clear. Skin crisped just enough to crackle. She spooned the butter over it once. Twice.

It was perfect. She knew that.

Her phone buzzed.

Ben: Running late.

“This muthafucka,” Annaliese mumbled to herself, rolling her eyes.

Two words. No apology. No estimate.

She stared at the screen, the kitchen still warm. She thought about how she’d leveled the spices with the back of a knife. How she’d timed the resting period down to the minute, trusting that precision yielded results.

She typed back.

Annaliese: Okay.

She waited. Five minutes. Ten.

She poured a glass of wine. Took a sip. The chicken rested on the stove, skin still glossy, still forgiving.

She checked her phone again. Nothing.

She called him. Straight to voicemail.

“I can’t even believe this shit,” she said to herself.

She set the phone face-down on the counter.

This was the moment. She could still save it. Turn the stove back on low. Tent the chicken with foil. Keep it soft. Keep herself pliable.

Instead, she did nothing.

She didn’t turn the stove back on. She didn’t cover it. She didn’t light the candles.

She sat down. Crossed her legs. Let the minutes pass.

She watched the skin lose its shine. Watched the edges tighten. She knew exactly how long it would take for the moisture to start pulling back, for the meat to firm up in quiet protest.

If he was going to be late, she decided, then so was the tenderness.

Waiting does that. It dries things out.

She took another sip of wine, unswallowed. Thought, briefly, about reheating. About staying soft.

Then she smiled. Small. Resolved.

No.

If he could arrive without urgency, then she could withhold without apology. So she left the chicken where it was. And with it, the part of herself that had been waiting to be met warm.

 

The wine glass was empty when Ben finally walked in.

“Hey,” he said, voice light. Like he was stepping onto a stage.

Annaliese stayed on the couch. The empty glass was still in her hand.

“You’re late,” she said.

“I told you I’d be late.”

She smiled at that.

“My grandmother always said,” Annaliese said, tone gentle, “the only things open this time of night are hospitals and legs.”

Ben stilled.

“And you don’t look like you’ve been to the ER.”

He scoffed and turned away, heading for the kitchen.

“Jesus, Annaliese,” he said, staring into the skillet. “You really wake up every day looking for a reason to turn nothing into something.”

The chicken sat there. Skin dull. Edges tightening. Ruined. He reached down, tore a wing from the carcass, and bit into it.

She followed him in. “Nothing?” she asked. “You’re chewing.”

He grimaced, the bite dusty in his mouth. “This is dry as hell.”

“I know.”

He looked at her, irritation sharpening. “You just… left it?”

“I did.”

“Why?”

She leaned back against the counter, arms folded—not defensive, just finished explaining herself.

“Because that’s what waiting does,” she said. “It pulls all the moisture out.”

Ben laughed, sharp and humorless. “You’re unbelievable.”

“No,” she said. “I’m consistent.”

He shook his head, pacing now. “You know what this is? You picking a fight instead of just saying you’re mad.”

“I’m not mad,” Annaliese said. “I’m observant.”

“That’s worse,” he snapped. “You turn everything into a metaphor.”

She didn’t blink. “Everything becomes one when you stop responding to it directly.”

Ben dragged a hand down his face. “I told you I was late.”

“You told me you’d be late,” she corrected. “You didn’t tell me I’d be an afterthought.”

“That’s not fair.”

She stepped closer—not loud, not rushed.

“You keep saying that,” she said. “Like fairness is something that happens automatically instead of something you participate in.”

The smoke detector chirped faintly, as if agreeing.

Ben glanced at the hallway but didn’t move.

“Fitting,” Annaliese said, her voice razor-sharp. “It’s just a dying battery. Another warning you’ve decided to tune out.”

Ben flushed. “You always do this. You stack these moments up like evidence.”

“Because you keep doing the same thing and calling it an accident.”

“Oh, here we go,” he said. “Now I’m a villain because I didn’t make it home for dinner.”

“No,” Annaliese said. “You’re a villain because you made it home and acted like timing didn’t matter.”

He opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle of water, twisted the cap too hard.

“You know,” he said, voice mocking, “Hospitals and legs. You really think that’s clever?”

“I think it’s accurate. And I think you know it.”

Ben scoffed. “So what, you think I was out cheating?”

“I think that when someone disappears without regard, they don’t get to be offended by what fills the silence.”

“You want to accuse me? Then accuse me.”

“I don’t need to. Your defensiveness is doing the work.”

The skillet popped as the burner clicked back on.

“What are you doing?” he snapped.

“Letting it fucking burn,” she said. “You seem to understand things better once they’re ruined.”

Smoke curled upward, bitter and sharp. The rosemary crossed the line from fragrant to acrid.

Ben stepped forward. “Turn it off.”

“Why? Now timing matters?”

The alarm shrieked, joining the argument with a shrill, piercing opinion of its own.

Ben laughed, frantic. “This is insane.”

“No,” Annaliese said, raising her voice not at all. “This is what happens when I stop cleaning up your mess.”

She reached for the empty plate and held it between them.

“This,” she said, “is what I’m left with when you decide I’ll wait.”

Ben looked at the plate like it might indict him. “You burn dinner to make a point?”

She turned the burner off. The smoke lingered.

“No,” she said. “Dinner was the warning.”

She set the plate down. Empty.

“My grandmother was right,” she said. “At this hour, whatever’s open tells you exactly what someone values.”

Ben swallowed.

She picked up her keys.

“And tonight, you didn’t come home hungry for me.”

The alarm screamed on, shrill and judgmental, refusing to let the silence return.

Ben didn’t move to turn it off.

Neither did she.

They stood there in the kitchen—steel, glass, clean lines everywhere. The mid-century openness that had once felt aspirational now felt exposed. Nothing to hide behind. No walls to absorb the sound.

Finally, Ben broke first.

“This is ridiculous,” he yelled over the noise. “You’re blowing this up.”

Annaliese paused by the doorway, keys still in her hand. She didn’t leave. Not yet.

“That’s the thing,” she said, turning back to him. “You keep insisting this is one night. And I keep trying to explain that it’s not.”

She gestured—not just to the kitchen, but to the house itself. The clean lines. The deliberate calm. The way everything looked settled even when it wasn’t.

“It’s this place,” she continued. “This life. The way you move through it like you’re a guest.”

Ben scoffed. “That’s bullshit.”

“Is it?” she asked.

She walked past him into the living room. The alarm still shrieked behind them, muffled now, relentless. The floor-to-ceiling windows reflected them back at themselves—two figures occupying the same space, angled just enough to never quite align.

“You love this house,” Ben said, following her. “You picked it.”

“I picked a desperate attempt at a fresh start,” she corrected. “Or who I thought we were trying to be.”

She stopped near the bookshelf. The one they’d styled together when they moved in, back when the realtor had said fresh start like it was a promise instead of a suggestion. Art books. Travel guides with pristine spines. A framed black-and-white photo from Palm Springs. “It’s been four months, Ben. Four months of thinking a dream house could fix what broke.”

Ben leaned against the wall. “We needed this place. To rebuild.”

“To patch over,” she said. “You said, ‘This feels grown.’ Like a mortgage could cover the cracks.”

Ben stiffened. “And we have rebuilt.”

“Have we? Or did we just put nicer furniture around the silence?”

That landed harder than anything she’d said all night.

Ben straightened. “That’s not fair.”

She looked at him. Really looked at him—the way she had learned to after the thing, always scanning for what wasn’t being said.

“You keep saying that like it’s a shield,” she said. “Like if you repeat it enough, it’ll erase what we never dealt with.”

The alarm finally cut off on its own, exhausted. The quiet afterward pressed in, thick and accusing.

Ben exhaled, rubbing the back of his neck. “What do you want from me, Annaliese?”

She took a slow breath. This was the question he always asked—like the problem was abstract. Like she hadn’t been answering it since the night everything shifted and neither of them had known how to say we’re not okay without making it permanent.

“I want to know where you go,” she said. “Not physically. I don’t care about the GPS. I mean where you leave to.”

He frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“You disappear,” she said. “Not dramatically. Quietly. Ever since… then.” She didn’t name it. She never had to. “You check out. You stay longer at work. You sit in your car. You take calls you don’t take in front of me. And when you come home, you expect me to be… already adjusted. Like I should’ve recalibrated while you were gone.”

Ben laughed, but there was no humor in it. “So, now I’m not allowed to have space?”

“You have all the space you want,” she said. “You just don’t want to admit you’re using it to avoid what we never repaired.”

“That’s not true.”

“Then say it,” she challenged, her voice steady. “Say you’re still here. Say you didn’t leave part of yourself behind that night and never come back for it.”

He opened his mouth. Closed it.

Annaliese felt it then—the shift. The moment the argument stopped being about lateness, or chicken, or tone—and settled fully into the thing that had been haunting them from room to room.

She turned and walked down the hallway toward the bedroom.

He followed, slower now.

Because they both knew:

that room remembered everything.

 

Their bedroom was immaculate. Evidence without context.

She stopped at the foot of the bed. “When was the last time you touched me without it feeling like an obligation?”

Ben stiffened. “That’s not—”

“Answer the question.”

He looked away. “That’s not fair.”

She nodded. “There it is.”

She opened the top drawer. Lingerie folded with care. Unused.

“I keep warming things up,” she said. “And you keep letting them go cold.”

Ben’s voice sharpened. “You think I don’t notice the way you look at me? Like you’re already gone?”

“I look at you like someone who’s tired of guessing.”

“You always do this. You wait until I’m exhausted.”

“No,” she said. “I wait until I’m sure.”

He stepped closer. “Sure of what?”

“That you don’t want this the way I do anymore.”

Ben exhaled slowly. “I just don’t want to feel like I’m constantly failing you.”

“And I don’t want to feel like I’m constantly auditioning.”

Ben sat on the edge of the bed. He looked smaller. “I don’t know how to be what you want.”

Annaliese nodded. “And I don’t know how to keep shrinking what I need.”

Ben stared at the floor. “You never looked at me the same after that night.”

Annaliese’s breath caught. “Which night?”

“Don’t play crazy,” Ben snapped. “There’s only one night that caused all of this.”

She crossed her arms. “I remember a lot of nights, Ben.”

He looked up, eyes sharp. “March. That Thursday. The one you never bring up unless you’re already halfway out the door.”

“The night you didn’t come home,” she said.

“I came home.”

“At sunrise. With an explanation you rehearsed.”

“I told you what happened.”

“You told me a version. And then you asked me to move on from it without ever letting me understand it.”

Ben ran a hand through his hair. “I didn’t cheat.”

“I didn’t say you did,” she said.

“But you think it,” he snapped.

“I think,” she said, “that something broke that night. And instead of repairing it, we built this house on top of it.”

“You punished me,” he said. “Ever since.”

“No. I waited. And you kept proving I shouldn’t.”

She turned toward the hallway. “This was never about being late. It’s about you being halfway out the door—and me finally deciding not to follow.”

She picked up her keys again.

Ben stood. “So, that’s it?”

“No,” she said. “This is just the first time I stopped reheating the same meal and pretending it was new.”

She looked towards the kitchen.

“At some point, you have to admit when something’s been sitting too long.”

She left him in the smoke.

The front door closed. Not a slam. Worse.

 

Ben followed her outside. Panic disguised as anger.

“You don’t get to walk away like that,” he yelled into the dark.

She stood by her car door. “That’s funny. Because you walked away first.”

Ben threw his keys. They clattered.

“You want to talk about walking away?” he snapped. “You want to talk about me?”

He stepped closer, too close now, the air between them buzzing.

“You have no idea what it’s like,” he said, voice rising, “to live with someone who looks at you like you’re the reason everything went wrong. Like you’re one bad decision away from being the villain.”

Annaliese turned. “I don’t look at you like that.”

“Yes, you do. Ever since March.”

Her breath stuttered. “March.”

“That night,” Ben said. “The hospital. The way everything went silent after.”

Annaliese swallowed. “I lost our baby. Don’t reduce it to a date.”

“You told me not to go to that meeting. You told me to rest. And I didn’t. I thought I knew my body.” Her voice sharpened. “And I punished myself for that long before you ever did.”

Ben stopped pacing. He was shaking now, visible tremors running through his hands, his jaw.

“I watched you bleed in that hospital bed!” he screamed, the words tearing out of him, spit flying in the dark. Tears finally spilled over, hot and fast. “And I couldn’t stop thinking that it was your fault!” He choked, gasping for air like he was drowning. “If you had just listened to me! If you had just stayed home, we wouldn’t be here!”

There it was.

Annaliese stared at him. “So instead of telling me how you felt,” she said, “you just disappeared.”

“I didn’t disappear,” he snapped. “I stayed. I paid the bills. I showed up.”

“You stayed in the house,” she said. “You didn’t stay with me.”

His voice rose. “I didn’t know how! Every time I came near you, all I could think was—” He stopped himself, breath ragged.

“Say it,” she said. “Say what you’ve been thinking.”

Ben’s face twisted, grief and rage colliding.

Silence.

Annaliese’s eyes filled. “So, you punished me. For surviving.”

“That’s not what I—”

“You stayed out all night. The night we came home from the hospital. I was bleeding. And you didn’t come back until morning.”

“I couldn’t breathe in that house,” he whispered.

“And I couldn’t breathe without you. But I stayed.”

He covered his face. “I tried. But I touched you and I just felt the loss.”

“So, you let me rot. You let me feel like my body failed you.”

“That’s not fair.”

She shook her head. “You keep saying that like fairness survived March.”

Ben collapsed onto the steps. “You think I don’t hate myself for that night? For leaving?”

“I don’t need you to hate yourself. I needed you to choose me after.”

He looked up, stripped bare. “I don’t know how to fix this.”

Annaliese’s voice cracked. “And I don’t know how to keep loving someone who made my grief a verdict.”

Silence fell hard.

Ben swallowed. “So, what happens now?”

Annaliese looked past him, toward the house. The burned chicken. The care she’d put into something that was never going to be received.

“What happens now,” she said, “is you finally sit with the truth you avoided.”

She opened her car door.

“And I stop reheating a love that went cold the night you left me alone with my loss.”

The door sealed. The engine turned over.

 

Ben stayed where he was, the house looming behind him. And for the first time since March, there was no one left to blame but himself. Inside, the chicken continued to blacken, filling the empty house with the sharp, bitter smell of something burning.