Nine years is a long time to pretend you are not noticing something.

Every Wednesday, same as clockwork, I’d wake up around 4:30 and the bed would already be empty. Not cold-empty like he’d just gotten up.

Cold-empty like he’d been gone a while. I’d hear the back door sometime later, maybe 6:15, 6:20. By the time I came downstairs he’d be showered, dressed, coffee already made. Like a normal Tuesday had just rolled into a normal Wednesday. I asked him once, early on. He said he liked to walk in the mornings, clear his head. I said something like, “At 4:45?” and he just kind of smiled and handed me a mug. I let it go. That was probably 2015 or 2016.

The thing is, I’m not the jealous type. I want to say that because I know how this sounds. I was not running worst-case scenarios in my head every Wednesday morning for nine years. Mostly I just thought it was a weird habit, maybe something left over from before we met, some kind of insomnia routine he’d never quite explained. Daniel is not a big sharer. I knew that about him going in. He’s warm, he shows up, he remembers things. But he keeps parts of himself behind a door that doesn’t quite open all the way, and I figured that was just him.

But there was the mud.

Not every week, but often enough. Little dried clumps of it near the heel of his boots by the back door. I don’t know why that stuck with me. You don’t get mud like that from walking the neighborhood. I never said anything about it. I just noticed it and filed it somewhere and kept filing it every time it showed up.

This past April, I decided to follow him. I don’t know what tipped me over exactly. I think it was more that nine years had just started to feel like a long time to not know something about the person sleeping six inches away from you. I set my alarm for 4:30, which meant I barely slept. I heard him get up at 4:40, heard him move through the house, heard the back door. I gave it five minutes and then I got in my car.

His taillights were already a few blocks ahead. I kept my distance. He drove maybe twelve miles, out past the high school, past the strip mall on Route 9 where we used to get pizza on Fridays. Then he turned onto a road I had never been down, gravel, lined with these old oak trees. I pulled over and watched from a distance as he parked near a gate.

It was a cemetery. A small one, older looking, tucked back from the road.