On Sunday evenings, Naomi stood at the kitchen counter waiting for the kettle, rehearsing a sentence she never said out loud: are we okay?
Daniel was in the next room, scrolling. He wasn't unkind, and that was almost the hardest part. He just seemed to be standing behind a pane of glass, and no matter how warmly she knocked, she couldn't tell if he could hear her.
So she tried harder. She planned the weekends, remembered his mother's birthday before he did, and learned which evenings to leave him alone. When he went quiet, she became softer, lighter, less likely to need anything at all.
And the strange thing was that the more she gave, the quieter the house got.
She had made herself so easy to love that there was nothing left for him to do.
One night around one in the morning, unable to sleep, she found a video by a relationship coach named James Bauer about something he calls the hero instinct. She nearly closed it. She was tired of rules and scripts.
But one idea stayed with her after the screen went dark: that many men don't pull away because they feel too little, but because they feel unneeded. That a man can love you deeply and still quietly wonder what he's for.
She lay there thinking of every time she had said no, it's fine, I've got it.
Nothing dramatic followed. She asked him to help choose a bookshelf instead of choosing it herself. She thanked him, specifically, for fixing the tap. Some evenings were awkward. Some evenings he stayed in the kitchen a little longer than he needed to.
And one Sunday, she walked into the other room and said the sentence out loud.
It was smaller than she'd feared, and he didn't flinch.