At 6:52 a.m., you are already dressed.
You choose jeans, a soft gray sweater, and the pair of shoes you can move quickly in if you need to. You dab concealer over the mark on your cheek, not because you want to hide it forever, but because you want control over when it gets seen and by whom. Daniel is still asleep upstairs, one arm thrown across the bed like a man who believes night erased what he did in the kitchen.
You move through the house with the strange calm that comes after fear burns itself down to purpose.
The coffee maker hums. The refrigerator light glows when you open it. You take out eggs, butter, orange juice, and the biscuit dough you bought two days ago, back when you were still planning for a weekend that looked normal from the outside. You set everything on the counter and realize your hands are no longer shaking.
That surprises you.
You thought courage would feel hot, dramatic, loud. Instead, it feels almost cold, like a clear winter morning when every edge in the world suddenly sharpens and nothing looks soft enough to hide behind. You crack eggs into a bowl and whisk them with a steadiness you haven’t felt in years.
At exactly 7:01, there is a knock at the front door.
Not tentative. Not aggressive. Just one firm knock, then another, the kind that says the person on the other side already knows they belong here. When you open it, Michael is standing on the porch in a dark jacket over a white T-shirt, his hair damp from the early Ohio mist, his jaw tight in the way it always got when he was forcing himself not to say everything he was thinking.
For a second, neither of you speaks.
He takes one look at your face and his own changes. It is not outrage first. It is heartbreak. The outrage comes a breath later, rising behind his eyes like something with teeth, but heartbreak gets there before it does, and that almost undoes you more than anything Daniel did the night before.
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