The Day My Husband Said He Was Impotent

Friday night. The couch. The particular quiet of a week that had already taken too much out of both of us.

I'd been thinking about it all day — how to do it casually, how to make it sound like nothing. Like a woman who simply wanted a weekend away with her husband. Like a woman who had not found a receipt in a blazer pocket and spent four days turning it over in her hands like a stone she couldn't put down.

Ethan was beside me on the couch, his phone in his hand, the blue light of the screen catching the angles of his face. The TV was on but neither of us was watching it. Some cooking show with too much background music. I had a glass of wine I'd barely touched.

I leaned into him. Let my head rest against his shoulder the way I used to, easy and natural, the way you lean into something you trust to hold your weight.

"We haven't gone anywhere in forever," I said. My voice was light. Conversational. I was almost impressed by myself. "What if we did a night away next weekend? Somewhere nice. I was thinking — The Lyle."

He didn't look up.

His thumb kept moving on the screen. Scrolling. Whatever he was reading, he kept reading it.

"I'm pretty slammed right now," he said. "Maybe later."

Maybe later. Two words that mean nothing. Two words designed to end a conversation without technically closing a door.

I kept my head on his shoulder. I kept my voice easy.

"What about next month, then? Our anniversary's coming up. We could make a thing of it."

That one landed differently. I felt it — the almost imperceptible shift in his body, the small recalibration. He looked up from his phone. Not at me, exactly. More like past me, at some middle distance, his brow pulling together in that way it does when he's mildly annoyed by something he considers beneath his attention.

"Addie." He said my name the way you say it when you're about to ask someone to stop. "You've been so —" He paused, chose a word. "What's going on with you lately? You seem like you have a lot of time on your hands."

The sentence hit me somewhere between the ribs.

I smiled.

I actually smiled — I felt my face do it, automatic, practiced, the same smile I'd been rehearsing in the hallway mirror four nights ago. The one that looks like everything is fine.

"Nothing," I said. "I just miss you, that's all."

I patted his knee once, lightly, and stood up.

"I'm going to get some water."

I walked to the kitchen.

I turned on the tap and filled a glass and stood at the counter with my back to the living room, and I pressed my fingers around the rim of the glass until the tips went white. The tap was still running. I didn't turn it off. I just stood there and listened to the water and let myself understand what had just happened.

He hadn't asked where The Lyle was.

He hadn't said, *which hotel is that*, or *I don't think I know it*, or any of the dozen small, innocent things a man says when a name means nothing to him. He had skipped straight past it. Stepped over it like a crack in the pavement he'd memorized the location of.

A man with a clear conscience asks questions.

A man with something to hide changes the subject.

I turned off the tap.

I stood there another moment, very still, the glass of water cool in my hands, and I thought: *okay*. Just that. Just the one word, quiet and certain, settling into place like the last piece of something I'd been assembling in the dark.

I went back to the couch. I sat down beside him. I picked up the wine I'd left on the coffee table and I took a sip and I looked at the TV, where someone was folding pasta dough with their hands, and I was fine. I was completely fine.

And then I saw his phone screen.

Not intentionally. He'd shifted, tilting it slightly, and the notification was right there at the top of the screen, bright and brief the way they always are.

*Camille Reyes liked your post.*

I looked at it for exactly the amount of time it takes to read eight words. Then I looked back at the TV.

Camille Reyes.

I had never heard that name in my life.

I turned it over quietly, the way I'd been turning things over all week. I didn't say anything. I finished my wine. I watched the cooking show for another twenty minutes, and I laughed once at something the host said, and eventually I stretched and said I was going to take a bath, and Ethan said *mm* without looking up.

I ran the water in the en suite. Let it fill. Listened to it.

Then I sat down on the edge of the bathtub and I picked up my phone.

I typed the name into the search bar.

*Camille Reyes.*

The first result was the team page on Ethan's company website. I recognized the logo before the page fully loaded. I tapped through.

She was twenty-seven. Her photo was the kind companies take when they want to seem approachable — warm background, natural light, a smile that looked genuine rather than performed. She had dark hair and the kind of easy confidence that reads clearly even in a headshot. Her title was Senior Client Relations Manager.

She worked in Ethan's building.

I sat on the edge of the bathtub and I looked at her face for a long time. The water was still running behind me, getting hotter, starting to steam. I didn't move. I just looked.

I wasn't looking for something to confirm. I think I already knew. I was doing something else — something quieter and stranger. I was trying to understand what it meant that this was the face. That out of everywhere the world might have taken us, this was where we'd ended up. Him on the couch with his phone. Me in a bathroom with the water running, looking at a stranger's photograph.

I wasn't crying.

I noticed that clearly, the way you notice the absence of something you expected to feel. No tears. No tightness in my throat. Just a cold, flat stillness that started in my chest and moved outward, until my hands felt it, and my feet, and the back of my neck.

I was cold.

That was all.

I turned the phone face-down on my knee. I reached over and turned off the tap. The silence that followed was very complete.

I sat in it for a while.

Then I stood up, set my phone on the counter, and looked at my reflection in the mirror above the sink.

I looked like a woman who had just learned something she already knew.

I looked like a woman who was going to have to decide what to do with that.