“How long are we going to live like this?”
Jian asked, closing the refrigerator door. A tremor rippled through the hand holding the milk carton. I sat clutching the remote—television dark, the veins on the back of my hand pulsing. Since that night a year ago, we have spat out the same question every evening, then swallowed it whole again. There is no answer—only a silence as cold and thick as the frost lining the fridge.
A scent that lingered like dust
March 2023. Jian came home wrapped in a grey wool coat. On a windless afternoon, the alley outside our gate was threaded with another man’s cigarette smoke. For ten days, sometimes only three, it drifted between the bedsheets and the cap of the toothpaste tube. Every night Jian scrubbed her nape raw beneath the shower, yet the bruise blooming there refused to dissolve with soap. Once she flung the towel aside and said,
“I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
The words soaked into the room. I couldn’t bring myself to open the window; if the smoke escaped, I feared she would follow it out.
Serrated marks on her wrist
That night, under the blanket, I seized Jian’s wrist. My palm burned, yet my fingertips quivered—afraid that letting go would send her tumbling into dark air. She trembled like a child who had mislaid the place to hide. My fingerprints stayed behind, ridged and serrated. By morning they had ripened to violet. We both pretended not to see.
The nightly text: “Dinner with colleagues”
At eleven sharp Jian sends the message: “Running late—team dinner. Don’t worry.” I answer with a single syllable: Sure. Then I switch on live location; she grants it without protest. Her phone has no passcode—she volunteers every breadcrumb of her day. Still, I cannot look away. A silent war plays out on the white screen, neither side willing to be the first to surrender.
On my birthday last month we sliced cake in a quiet restaurant. Jian smiled and said,
“I’m really happy.”
I nodded, while a black question coiled inside my skull: Is she truly happy—inside the cage I built for her?
When the stitches begin to snap
Hyun-su knows my story; he walked a parallel road. Six months ago his wife miscarried at five months. The doctors blamed stress. Since then Hyun-su cannot meet her eyes. We tilted back shots of soju in a noon-empty bar.
“I can hear the stitches popping, one by one,” he muttered.
I said nothing, only met the transparency pooling in his gaze. In it I saw again the bruise on Jian’s neck, the ghost of cigarette smoke. The wound has been sewn shut, but the scar sinks deeper.
At the edge of silence
Each night I check Jian’s wrist. The bruise has healed, yet the serrated imprint remains. In her sleep she nudges my hand away; I close my fingers again—not because I fear she will fall, but because I fear we both will plummet endlessly if I let go.
Will an answer ever arrive? Or is the question itself our final destination? The frost on the refrigerator thickens; the cigarette scent fades. But the traces stay. The infidelity I tried to erase still breathes, stubborn and alive, on the tips of my fingers.