Chapter 2: The Logic of Empty Spaces
We had married when I was twenty-four. At the time, Evan Morris was a dazzling creature, a man who possessed the rare ability to fill a room without the slightest exertion. He had a booming, melodic laugh and expansive gestures that I had mistakenly categorized as strength. My mother, Carmen, a seamstress with three decades of tired fingers and cynical wisdom, had warned me. “Be careful, Jess,” she’d whispered. “Loud men are often just hollow on the inside. They need the noise to keep from hearing the emptiness.”
I hadn’t listened. I was young, and I thought her caution was merely an inability to be happy for a daughter who had found the “bright” life she never had.
The radiance lasted exactly eighteen months. After that, the light didn’t go out; it simply became… domestic. There were no dramatic betrayals, no bruises, nothing I could tell my friends to garner a round of drinks and sympathy. It was a slow, glacial erasure. It was the way his armchair sat in the exact center of the living room, a throne that demanded the most space. It was the way my books were relegated to the bottom shelf, my jacket pushed to the hook closest to the wall, my weekend plans always a footnote to his.
