Two in the Morning

Claire returns to a house that feels like a stranger's. She calls Paul's name into the dark hallway — a reflex, not a hope — and the silence swallows it. Every light goes on, room by room, as if brightness alone could fill what's missing. Charlie presses against her leg and gets put outside for the night. Paul always wanted the dog inside. But Paul isn't here.

The phone becomes a ritual she can't break. Check, nothing, lock, set down, wait, repeat. She tries to eat and can't remember when she last did. She makes tea and lets it go cold staring at Paul's empty chair. Sleep won't come — the bed is too big, his side too smooth, the pillow still carrying the faint indent of his head from the night before. She counts backwards from a hundred to quiet her mind. At seventy-two she checks the phone. At fifty-eight she gives up counting.

After one, she wanders the house in the dark. At two, she calls him. The voicemail greeting plays its warm, professional lie, and when the beep sounds, the words that come out are no longer angry. They're something worse.

The tears arrive after that — not the dramatic kind, just a slow leak that admits what her mind has been refusing to accept. He isn't coming back tonight.

Dawn arrives in watercolours — pink to gold — and Claire watches it from a couch she doesn't remember choosing, positioned to see an empty driveway she won't admit she's watching. The emotions have burned themselves out. She can't face the day. In the bathroom cabinet, behind the expired cough syrup and Paul's hay fever tablets, she finds the temazepam from months ago. Two small white pills, and the promise of a few hours where none of this exists. She climbs into bed with his pillow pressed to her chest and lets the dark tide carry her under.