Robert never bought me gifts.
Not once in 15 years.
No flowers. No cards. No birthday necklace tucked into a velvet box. No anniversary dinner at the kind of place where waiters folded napkins over your lap and called you Ma’am.
Robert never bought me gifts.
“Flowers die,” he always said.
“Cards get tossed.”
“Gifts are money leaving the house.”
He said it so often that, after a while, I started saying it with him in my head before he even opened his mouth.
Still, on the morning of my 35th birthday, I stood in our bedroom wearing my good navy dress and watching Robert knot his tie with shaking fingers.
That was the first strange thing.
Robert did not shake.
“Gifts are money leaving the house.”
He balanced our checkbook every Sunday with a blue pen, clipped coupons with the focus of a surgeon, and once drove 12 miles back to a grocery store because a cashier had charged us twice for canned tomatoes.
But that morning, he dropped his tie clip twice.
“Big day?” I asked.
His eyes met mine in the mirror, then slid away.
“For you, Elle.”
He only called me Elle when he was nervous or tender, and lately, he had been too exhausted to be either.
He only called me Elle when he was nervous.
For three months, he had been leaving before sunrise and coming home after midnight. His shirts smelled faintly of bleach and soap that was not ours. His knuckles were scraped.
Once, I found a red scratch along the inside of his wrist, thin and angry, like someone’s fingernail had caught him.
When I asked, he always gave me the same answer.
“Nothing happened.”
That was the second strange thing.
Robert did not lie well.
That was the second strange thing.
At seven that night, my sister Lila filled our dining room with balloons, cheap paper streamers, and enough noise to make our little house feel like a restaurant.
My mother brought a casserole. Our neighbors came with wine. Someone lit candles on a chocolate cake.
Robert stood near the kitchen doorway, one hand in his pocket, watching me like he was waiting for a verdict.
After everyone sang, he stepped forward and set a cream-colored box in front of me.