The morning light came through the kitchen window like an accusation. Pale and thin, the kind of gray that made everything look tired. I sat at the table with my palms flat on the laminate, feeling the cool slick surface against my skin, watching the condensation rings from last night's glasses still ghosted there. Mira made soft sleeping sounds in her bouncer beside me, her tiny chest rising and falling, and I kept my eyes on her instead of the doorway.

I hadn't slept. I'd lain in the dark of our bedroom—our bedroom, though it didn't feel like mine anymore—staring at the ceiling and feeling the faint thrum of something new taking root inside me. Luke had stayed in the guest room. The door had clicked shut and neither of us had moved to open it.

Now I heard him coming down the hall. His footsteps were heavier than usual, less careful. I watched him cross the kitchen with two mugs in his hands, and when he set them down on the table, he did it hard enough that the coffee sloshed over the rims. Brown liquid spread across the laminate in two small pools. He didn't wipe them up.

"Explain it to me."

His voice was flat. Not angry—flat. Like he'd used up all the anger somewhere in the guest room during the night and this was what was left. His eyes were red-rimmed, the kind of red that came from not sleeping, from staring at the same patch of ceiling I'd been staring at. His glasses sat slightly crooked on his nose.

I opened my mouth. Closed it. The words were all there, stacked up inside me like stones, but I didn't know how to lay them out in a way that wouldn't crush him.

He didn't sit down. He stood across the table from me, his hands hanging at his sides, and I realized he was gripping the hem of his t-shirt like he needed something to hold onto.

"I want to understand," he said, and the flatness cracked for just a second. "That's all I'm asking. I want to understand how we got here."

Mira stirred in her bouncer, a small sound, and we both looked at her. Her lips moved in her sleep, searching for something. My breasts ached with the familiar pressure of milk letting down, and I pressed my palms harder against the table, feeling the slick coolness ground me.

"Luke—"

"Don't." He held up a hand, and I saw it trembling, just slightly. "Don't start with I'm sorry. I don't want that yet. I want to understand."

The coffee was still spreading across the laminate. I watched it creep toward the edge of the table, a thin brown tide, and I thought about all the mornings we'd sat here. Luke with his cereal, me with my tea, Mira in the bouncer between us. The comfortable silence of two people who'd run out of things to say but hadn't noticed.

"How long?" he asked.

"A few weeks." The words came out smaller than I meant them to. "We met at the grocery store."

"The grocery store." He laughed, but there was no humor in it. "You went to get milk and came home with—" He stopped. Swallowed. "I called you three times that day. You didn't answer."

I remembered. His name lighting up my phone screen while I was in Damon's truck, his cum still warm inside me, my hand pressed flat against my belly where his child was already taking root. I'd watched the screen light up and die, light up and die, and I hadn't reached for it.

"I know," I said.

"Is that when it happened? That day?"

The question hung in the air between us. Mira's breathing was the only sound in the kitchen, soft and rhythmic, a timer counting down to when she'd wake and need me.

"Yes," I said. And then, because I owed him that much, "But it started before that. Weeks before that."

Luke's jaw tightened. He pulled out the chair across from me and sat down heavily, like his legs had given out. The table rattled on its legs from the impact, and the coffee sloshed again in the mugs.

"Weeks," he repeated.

"I didn't plan it." The words felt useless even as I said them. "I didn't go looking for it."

"But you found it."

"Yes."

He stared at me across the table. I could see him trying to reconcile the woman in front of him with the woman he thought he'd married. The woman who flinched from his touch. The woman who bled every time he tried to love her. The woman who kept saying not tonight, not yet, maybe tomorrow.

"Was it—" He stopped. Started again. "Was it better? With him?"

The question landed like a blow to my chest. I looked down at my hands, at the wedding ring still on my finger, and I thought about lying. I thought about telling him no, it was terrible, it meant nothing, I was just confused. I thought about all the ways I could soften this into something he could survive.

And then I thought about Damon. The way he'd looked at me in the dairy aisle like I was the only woman in the world. The way his hand had felt when he'd touched mine, like he was afraid I'd disappear. The way he'd said my name, soft and rough, like it was something precious.

"It was different," I said.

"Different how?"

I could feel the shape of the truth pressing against my teeth, wanting out. The whole ugly, beautiful, terrible truth of it. And I knew that once I said it, there was no taking it back. No more lies. No more pretending I'd fallen.

I looked up from the table. I met his eyes.

"How we drifted. That's where it starts."