Chapter 74: THE WEIGHT

Lisa’s POV

Silence isn’t always quiet out loud.

It is so loud that sometimes it keeps me up at night.

That was the silence that settled in our home and we brought with us to the office. Not the tactful, far-off silence that we had grown accustomed to at the beginning of this arrangement, but something alive and whole, that sat between us, laden with all the things we were too scared to say.

Every glance.

Every nearly-touch.

Every word we swallowed.

I told myself I was being paranoid, that nothing was different — that Leo was still only my husband by name, my collaborator in strategy, my avenue to an end. But my thoughts turned on me in little, ceaseless ways.

Closing my office door “to work,” I wasn’t thinking about papers to sign or reports to review. I was thinking about how his hand rubbed mine when he handed me a file. The way his voice softened when he said my name, as if it contained a special meaning he didn’t have for anyone else.

How his eyes rest when he thinks I’m not looking.

And what is worse? I played it all in my brain like a hit song to whose lyrics I pretended ignorance.

I told myself to concentrate. I forced my eyes to move over the lines of text on my screen, going back over the same paragraph multiple times without really reading it. As ever, my mind went back to that morning in the kitchen. The burnt toast. The unexpected laugh that had left me. The heat which had blossomed in my chest at so simple a, so mundane a instant.

It was risky how normal it was.

I slid my chair back and rose, I made my way to the window to hold myself. Moving on, outside in the city, the pace was business as usual, and oblivious to the bizarre battle that was being waged within me. Cars raced by, people rushed by, life went on without skipping a beat.

Why can’t mine do that?

A tap on the door brought me out of my reverie.

“Come in.”

He walked in slowly, cautiously, almost as if he were reluctant. Leo never hesitated — not in talks, not in business, not with enemies. But recently, with me, his certainty had softened into caution.

“Just checking on the coalition draft,” he said. “I thought I would find out if you require any assistance for the last revisions.”

“I’m almost done,” I told her. “Just fine-tuning language here and there.”

He nodded, but he didn’t leave. Instead, he moved a bit closer, his eyes flicking to the papers on my desk even though I knew he wasn’t looking at them.

The silence stretched between us again.

“You’ve been gazing out that window a good bit today,” he murmured.

I sighed quietly. “Is that against the law?”

“No. Just… an observation.”

I turned around and saw him. “And what do you notice, Leo?”

His eyes rose to mine and something unreadable frozen there. “That you look like you’re running from something that isn’t even behind you.”

The truth in his words cut much deeper than I thought it would.

“I’m thinking,” I whispered-corrected.

“About what?”

I baffled. “About things I shouldn't be thinking about.”

He looked intently at my face, as if trying to read invisibility ink on my skin.

“Funny. I’ve had the same trouble.”

My heart stuttered. “That doesn’t sound very comforting coming from you.”

A trace of sad smile appeared on his lips. “It was n’t supposed to be.”

Too much truth in the moment. Too honest. Too vulnerable.

“You should go, Leo,” I told him quietly. “Before this is going to become one of those conversations we act later as if it never took place.”

His jaw tightened. “You’re very good at pretending, Lisa.”

“Someone has to be.”

He retreated gradually his back grazed the items to his left — but he never took his gaze from mine.

“And what happens when the pretending runs out?” he asks.

The question stayed with me after he eventually turned and walked away, the door softly closing behind him. What happens when the pretending runs out?

I thought that sentence for the rest of the day.

Every time I glimpsed him in the hallway, our eyes met for a moment too long. When I heard his name uttered, my ears perked. I knew when he sat down in the conference room, as if an invisible tether connected us and I could sense him from across the hall.

Others had begun to notice.

Me and this one co-worker she gave me this curious smile as she walked by me. An aide murmured something to another staffer, and I knew better than to ask what it was related to.

It should have never been relevant.

But it did.

Because Leo wasn’t only a man. He was the man who shares my name on legal papers. The guy who lived in the same home, who i passed in the hallway, who got coffee in the same pot. Tied to the man who slept in my house, who pretended to be my friend, who left me in the dark.

That sort of recognition doesn’t stay invisible forever.

Later that night I got home before him, and the quiet of the house welcomed me like an old acquaintance that had become stranger. I set my bag on the counter but rather than put on music or turn on the TV, I just stood there and let the silence take me.

It was weird how it felt like there was part of it missing without him now. of cabinets. My footsteps were slow, as I meandered through the rooms, running my hands along the edges of tables and chairs as though I were outlining a memory. The couch we once sat on at opposite ends still reverberated with how close we had gotten. Our shoulders brushed in the kitchen doorway it seemed like a landmark-ticked up in the floor by our feet.

I saw my reflection in the hallway mirror and didn’t know who the woman was looking at me.

She seemed softer.

Less guarded.

More afraid.

“Don’t do this to yourself, Lisa,” I murmured, although the room was silent.

The door slammed open, and his step was there in a flash.

“You’re home early,” he said tenderly.

“The traffic was kind,”

He laid his keys on the table, and for a moment, we were both still. Then he turned and looked at me full on.

Again the silence.

Yet this time, it was different. Like a tempest gathering above two people standing in the open.

“I can’t stand this,” he said.

“What?” I said almost breathless.

“This in-between. The pretending.” He rakes a hand through his hair, a look of genuine frustration breaking through his usual composed expression. “I don’t know how to speak to you without breaking some fragile thing.”

“I don’t know how to listen without wishing for more than I should,” I admitted even as I was trying to stop myself.

We both were stunned by the words.

Our eyes locked, the truth revealed to us both, laying as clear as day between us like a bit of tangible air we could both breathe.

“And what do you think you ‘should’ want?” he inquired quietly.

I swallowed. “Not you.”

A long pause ensued.

“That’s unfortunate,” he whispered. “Because I stopped listening to 'should' a long time ago.”

My heart felt like it was going to rip itself loose.

“Leo… this is dangerous.” “Yes,” he said. “But it’s also real.”

I was the first to turn away, desperate for air, for distance, for mastery. I put my hands on the counter, trying to calm the tremors that were attacking my body.

“We can’t go down this road,” I said.

“Stop looking at me like that,” he said softly. “And I’ll stop looking back.”

I shut my eyes.

I couldn’t.

After that the silence fell again, but now it had ceased to be only unuttered tension.

It was an admission.

A shared truth just out of reach, hovering.

We made our way through the evening at a cautious arm’s length, brushing past one another in the corridor, bumping shoulders in doorways, confining our conversations to necessities only. Yet buried below every word was the same understanding.

What was changing. It was something neither of us was ready to name.

And you couldn’t get away from it, either of us. That night when I finally went to bed and stared up at the ceiling, one thought rang clearer than all the others.

There had never been an empty silence between us.

It held the seed of something we were both scared… And very much tempted… to let grow.