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My husband’s shirt smelled like a woman who wasn’t me.
I stood in the laundry room with Tyler’s collar lifted halfway to my face, and the perfume clinging to it was sharp and floral and entirely unfamiliar, nothing from any bottle I’d ever seen on our bathroom shelf. I lowered the shirt slowly back into the basket, the way you lower something you’re afraid of waking up.
The house was quiet around me the way it had been quiet for the past two years, ever since our younger one left for college and took the last of the noise with her. Eighteen years of mornings had happened in that kitchen, at the same worn wooden table where our two kids once ate cereal before the school bus came, the same low hum from the refrigerator I’d stopped hearing sometime around year three. Now the quiet had become its own kind of presence in the house, something that sat in the corners and waited.
