By the third night, when the space beside me was cold and his weight missing, the dread had a shape. I heard the back door click at three a.m., followed by the creak of the hallway boards that usually only announced our son coming home for the holidays. David froze when he saw me sitting up, his “just went outside for a minute” landing flat and wrong between us. This was the man whose life ran on rails: same chipped green mug, same grocery aisle route, same parking space at the office. Routine wasn’t just comfort for him; it was scaffolding. And now he had rearranged the map of our bed and the pattern of his nights in one abrupt, secretive motion. I ransacked our bedroom with shaking hands, expecting another woman, a diagnosis, a gambling app, anything that would match the way he watched me sleep. When he finally said, “Yes, there’s something I’m not telling you,” and disappeared down the hall, returning with a towel-wrapped, quivering bundle, my mind was still cataloging disasters as he placed the small, impossibly delicate, wide-eyed cause of all this uphea… Continues…