[Muhammad Hasan]

Chapter-14

The missing did not arrive all at once. It seeped in.
The first week after I ended the arrangement still carried the clean edge of decision. Sarah moved through the house with the careful posture of someone who had accepted a hard truth. She cooked. She asked about my day. She reached for me in bed with a kind of deliberate tenderness, as if physical closeness could stand in for the thing we had removed. I told myself the worst was over.
It was not.
By the tenth day the quiet in her eyes had changed. It was no longer the quiet of acceptance. It was the quiet of something being held underwater. She began leaving her phone face-down on the counter more often. When it buzzed she would glance at the screen, then set it aside without unlocking it if I was in the room. Once I walked past and saw Jake’s name before the display went dark. She did not mention it. Neither did I. The silence around the name became its own third presence.
On the fourteenth day the first real crack appeared.
I came home to find her sitting on the back steps in the cooling evening air, phone in both hands, staring at a message thread. She did not hear me until I was almost beside her. When she looked up her face was wet.
“He texted,” she said. No preamble. No attempt to hide the phone.
I sat down next to her. “Show me.”
She handed it over.
Jake: I know I’m not supposed to. I know the door is closed. I just drove past the old trailhead we used on the camping trip and I couldn’t not say something. I miss the way you sounded when you stopped pretending. That’s all. I’ll delete this after I send it if you want.
Sarah’s reply, sent twenty minutes earlier, was still visible.
Sarah: Please don’t delete it. I miss it too. I miss you. I shouldn’t say that. But I do.
I read the exchange twice. The words were simple. The damage was not.
“I told him not to text,” she said quietly. “Then I answered anyway. I’m sorry.”
“Did you ask him to stop?”
“No.”
“Do you want him to stop?”
She was silent for a long time. A car passed on the street behind the fence. Somewhere a sprinkler ticked on.
“I want the missing to stop,” she said at last. “It doesn’t. It gets louder every day he’s not here. I keep waiting for it to level off and instead it just finds new corners of the day to occupy. Making coffee. Driving past the grocery store where we once… everything. Lying next to you at night and feeling like part of me is still in that guest room or on that kitchen counter.”
I gave the phone back. “What do you want me to do with this?”
“I don’t know. Tell me to block him. Tell me I’m weak. Tell me the marriage is more important than a feeling that won’t shut up. I already know all of those things. They just don’t make the feeling smaller.”
We sat until the light left the yard. When we finally went inside she cooked dinner in silence. We ate in silence. In bed she turned her back to me and cried without sound. I rested my hand on her shoulder and felt the fine tremor of it. Sleep, when it came, was thin for both of us.
The texts did not stop.
They arrived at irregular intervals—late morning, mid-afternoon, once at 2:17 a.m. Sarah showed me each one, true to the honesty we had tried to keep even after the arrangement ended. Some were short.
Jake: Hard day. Hope yours is softer.
Some were longer.
Jake: I keep replaying the morning in the kitchen. Not the sex. The way you looked at me when you stopped performing. I don’t know what to do with that memory. It won’t sit still.
Sarah’s replies grew longer too. She stopped asking me whether she should answer. She simply answered and then placed the phone in my hand afterward like evidence.
One evening the exchange stretched across two hours while I sat in the living room pretending to read.
Sarah: It’s getting worse, not better. I thought the sharp edge would dull. Instead everything reminds me. The smell of the soap you both used. The way the guest-room door still doesn’t close right. I hate that I can still feel the shape of him when I’m with you.
Jake: I know. I tried going out with someone else last week. It felt like wearing someone else’s clothes. I left halfway through dinner.
Sarah: Don’t tell me things like that. It makes it harder.
Jake: I’m not trying to make it harder. I’m just not good at pretending this is clean.
When she finally put the phone down her hands were shaking.
“I should block him,” she said.
“Should,” I repeated.
“Yes. I should. And I can’t make my thumb do it. Every time I open the settings I stop. It’s like the missing has a physical weight and deleting the thread would be cutting off a limb I’m still using.”
I watched her face in the lamp light. The woman who had once invented clever stories about laundry baskets and step stools was gone. In her place was someone who no longer had the energy to lie and no longer knew how to stop wanting.
“I’m not going to tell you what to do with the phone,” I said. “But I need you to understand what this is doing to the space between us. Every text is a small door opening again. Every reply is you walking through it while I’m still in the house.”
“I know.” Her voice cracked. “I hate that I know and still do it.”
That night she reached for me with something close to desperation. The sex was intense and almost angry, as if she could burn the missing out of her body by force. Afterward she lay with her forehead against my collarbone and whispered, “I’m sorry I’m like this. I’m sorry the ending didn’t end the wanting.”
I had no answer that was both honest and kind. I only held her while the wanting sat between us like a third pulse.
By the end of the third week the missing had become the weather of the house.
Sarah moved through days as if walking against a current. She forgot simple things—keys, appointments, the fact that she had already poured coffee. She stood in front of the open refrigerator for long stretches without taking anything out. Once I found her in the guest room standing perfectly still in the center of the rug, eyes closed, as if listening for an echo.
Jake’s messages grew more frequent. He stopped pretending they were casual. One afternoon a string of them arrived while Sarah was in a work meeting she had dialed into from the kitchen table. I saw the previews stack up on the lock screen.
Jake: I can’t sleep.
Jake: I keep thinking about the rules and how we both failed them and how I still don’t regret the kitchen.
Jake: Tell me to stop and I will. But I need you to actually say it.
When her meeting ended she read them in silence, then typed for a long time.
Sarah: I can’t tell you to stop. I should. I know I should. But the only thing worse than the texts is the silence when they don’t come. I’m drowning either way.
She showed me the reply. I read it and felt something cold move through my chest.
“This is not sustainable,” I said.
“I know.”
“What happens when the drowning gets deeper?”
She looked at me with an expression I had never seen on her face before—raw, cornered, almost frightened of her own need. “I don’t know. That’s what scares me. I don’t know what I’ll do if this keeps growing and the only relief is the one person I’m not allowed to reach for.”
The rest of the evening passed in careful, exhausted conversation. We talked about blocking. We talked about changing her number. We talked about the possibility that the missing would eventually crest and recede the way grief sometimes does. None of the options felt real in her mouth. Each one dissolved as soon as she tried to hold it.
That night she did not reach for me. She lay on her side of the bed with her back turned and her phone face-down on the nightstand like a live thing she was trying not to touch. At 1:14 a.m. the screen lit the wall. She did not pick it up. The glow faded. Another message arrived at 1:31. Still she did not move. I watched her shoulders stay rigid until the sky began to lighten.
In the morning the phone was gone from the nightstand. I found it later on the bathroom counter, still locked, two new unread messages waiting. She had not opened them. She had also not deleted them.
The missing had stopped being a feeling she carried.
It had become the climate of her days, and the forecast showed no sign of clearing.