Chapter 1: The Lonely Wife and Her Dog
The candles had burned low, their flames drowning in pools of their own wax. Ruby watched one flicker and die, a thin trail of smoke curling toward the ceiling like a question no one would answer.
Beside her, Raj snored.
Not the gentle, rhythmic breathing of deep sleep. No, this was something else entirely—a jagged, stop-start thing that rattled in his throat and caught in his chest before releasing in a wet sputter. It had gotten worse over the years. Or maybe she'd just started noticing.
She turned her head on the pillow, studying the outline of him in the darkness. His back was to her, as it always was afterward. A wall of flesh and bone and indifference. The sheet had tangled around his waist, leaving his shoulders bare, and she could see the faint indentations where her fingernails had pressed into his skin.
Not from passion. From frustration.
Nine minutes. She'd counted. Nine minutes from the moment he rolled on top of her to the moment he rolled off, muttered something that might have been "good night," and turned away. She'd lain there, still aching, still wanting, staring at the ceiling while his breathing evened out and became that terrible snore.
The jasmine candle on her nightstand had almost guttered out, its scent now tinged with something acrid. Smoke and wax and the faint sourness of sweat. She should blow it out. Should get up, splash water on her face, maybe make herself a cup of tea and read until her eyes burned. Something other than lying here in the dark, her body humming with unspent energy, her mind spiraling through the same tired loops.
But moving felt like admitting defeat.
A warm weight shifted against her thigh. Bruno. His fur was impossibly soft, and when he stretched, his claws pricked gently through the sheet. He'd been curled at her side since before Raj came to bed, his yellow eyes tracking her husband's every movement with an suspicion that Ruby pretended not to notice.
She reached down, her fingers finding the spot behind his ears that made him rumble with pleasure. The sound vibrated through her palm, up her arm, settling somewhere in her chest.
"You're the only one who wants me," she whispered.
Bruno's tail thumped once against the mattress. Agreement. Or maybe just appreciation for the ear scratch. Hard to tell with cats.
Raj shifted in his sleep, mumbling something. A name. Not hers.
Ruby's hand stilled on Bruno's head. She waited, breath caught somewhere between her ribs and her throat, but Raj just snorted and settled again, his snoring resuming its irregular rhythm.
She exhaled slowly.
The ceiling fan clicked as it rotated. Click. Click. Click. She'd asked Raj to fix it six months ago. He'd said he would, the way he said he'd do a lot of things—with that absent smile, his eyes already on his phone, his mind already three meetings ahead.
She could fix it herself. Probably. She'd watched a YouTube video about it once, had even bookmarked it. But every time she thought about dragging the ladder out of the garage, about climbing up there and fiddling with wires and screws, something stopped her. Maybe it was the fear of electrocution. Maybe it was something else.
Maybe it was the knowledge that if she fixed it, there'd be one less thing to remind her of how much he didn't see her.
Bruno stretched again, his body going long and taut before he relaxed, boneless, against her hip. He didn't care about the ceiling fan. He didn't care about Raj's snoring or the nine minutes or the way her chest felt hollowed out, scraped clean of something she couldn't name.
He just wanted to be near her.
She turned on her side, facing away from Raj, and pulled Bruno closer. His purr was loud in the quiet room, a steady rumble that drowned out the snore, the fan's click, the distant hum of the city outside their window.
Four years.
She'd been married for four years, and she couldn't remember the last time Raj had looked at her the way he used to. The way he'd looked at her on their first date, when she'd worn that green dress that made her eyes look like sea glass and he'd spent the entire evening forgetting what he was saying mid-sentence because he got lost watching her mouth.
Now he looked through her. Past her. At his phone, his laptop, the television. At everything except her.
She'd tried. God, she'd tried. The lingerie that cost more than their monthly grocery budget. The candles, the music, the carefully planned evenings where she'd cooked his favorite meal and worn nothing underneath her dress and waited for him to notice.
He'd noticed. He'd appreciated. He'd fucked her with the same mechanical efficiency he applied to everything else in his life, and then he'd rolled over and gone to sleep, and she'd lain there in the dark, wondering when she'd become another item on his to-do list.
Bruno's whiskers tickled her arm. She smiled despite herself, despite everything, and pressed a kiss to the top of his head. He smelled like sunlight and clean fur and the tuna she'd fed him for dinner.
"You know what I did today?" she murmured against his ear. "I cleaned the bathroom. I organized the pantry. I watched four episodes of that show Raj said he wanted to watch, so I could be ready to discuss it with him. But he came home, ate dinner, scrolled through his phone, and fell asleep on the couch by eight."
Bruno's ears twitched.
"When he woke up, he stumbled into the bedroom and got on top of me like I was just... there." Her voice cracked, just a little. She bit her lip. "Like I'm furniture. A warm body. Something to use."
The word hung in the air, ugly and true.
She'd never said it out loud before. Had never let herself think it, really, not in those exact terms. But there it was—the thing she'd been avoiding, the truth she'd been tiptoeing around for months, maybe years.
She felt like furniture in her own marriage.
The tears surprised her. They came hot and fast, sliding down her cheeks before she could stop them, soaking into the pillowcase and Bruno's fur. He didn't seem to mind. He just pressed closer, his weight grounding her, his warmth a small comfort in the vast cold distance of the bed.
She shouldn't cry. She knew that. She had a good life by any objective measure. A beautiful house, a successful husband, enough money to buy whatever she wanted without checking the price tag. She'd grown up sharing a bedroom with her two sisters, eating rice and beans five nights a week because it was cheap and filling, watching her mother work double shifts and come home too exhausted to speak.
She was supposed to be grateful. She was supposed to be happy.
So why did she feel like she was drowning?
Bruno's tail curled around her wrist, a gentle question. She sniffled and wiped her face with the back of her hand, feeling ridiculous. Crying in the dark over what? A husband who didn't look at her? A life that looked perfect on the outside but felt hollow on the inside? A body that ached for something—someone—to touch it without calculation or obligation?
Pathetic. That's what she was. A rich housewife who couldn't figure out how to be satisfied.
She'd never said that word out loud either. Rich. It felt like a lie somehow, like a coat that didn't quite fit, even though she wore it every day. She'd grown up poor—not the romantic kind of poor you saw in movies, with quirky families and heartwarming lessons learned, but the grinding kind. The kind where you learned to hide the embarrassment, to pretend you weren't hungry, to smile when your friends got new shoes and you got hand-me-downs that were two sizes too big.
She'd sworn she'd never live like that. She'd worked, studied, clawed her way out with a scholarship and a degree and a carefully constructed persona that didn't let anyone see the cracks. And then she met Raj—handsome, ambitious, stable—and she'd thought she'd made it.
She'd thought she'd found her happy ending.
But happy endings didn't include lying awake at night while your husband ignored you, your body aching for something he'd never give you, your heart a bruise you kept pressing on to see if it still hurt.
It did. It always did.
Outside, a car passed, its headlights sweeping across the ceiling like searchlights. Ruby watched them go, the light fading into shadow, and listened to the silence creep back in.
She should leave. The thought appeared in her mind fully formed, like a stone dropping into still water. She could pack a bag right now, walk out the door, and never look back.
Bruno would come with her. He'd meow loudly from his carrier, probably, but he'd come.
But where would she go? What would she do? She had no job, no savings of her own, no friends in this city who wouldn't immediately call Raj to gossip. She'd given up everything to be his wife—her career, her friends, her own apartment, her independence. She'd handed him the keys to her life and said, Here. Make it beautiful.
And he had. On the outside.
On the inside, she was that girl again. The one who hid her shame behind a smile, who pretended everything was fine, who learned to survive by becoming what everyone expected and burying the rest.
She was beginning to wonder how much of herself was left buried. How much of her had withered and died in the four years she'd spent trying to be what Raj wanted.
Bruno meowed—a tiny sound, surprising from such a large cat. She looked down at him, his yellow eyes catching the dim light, and something in her chest shifted.
No. She wasn't gone. Not yet.
She was still here, underneath the layers of wife and partner and perfect hostess. She was still Ruby, still the girl who'd once convinced a professor to change her grade through sheer force of will, who'd gotten drunk at a frat party and argued philosophy with a bunch of seniors until the sun came up, who'd once kissed a woman in the back of a taxi because it felt like the most honest thing she'd ever done.
That girl wasn't dead. She was just sleeping.
And she was waking up.
Carefully, so as not to disturb Raj, Ruby slid out of bed. Bruno made a questioning chirp and followed, his claws clicking on the hardwood floor. The candles on her nightstand had all guttered out now, leaving only the faint glow of the streetlights outside to guide her.
She walked to the window, her bare feet cold against the wood. The city sprawled below her, a million lights flickering in the dark, a million lives being lived in apartments and houses and cars and bars. Somewhere out there, people were laughing, kissing, fighting, loving. Somewhere out there, life was happening.
She pressed her palm to the cold glass.
She wanted more. The thought was dangerous, electric, humming through her like a live wire. She wanted more than this—more than nine minutes, more than a husband who didn't see her, more than a beautiful house that felt like a cage.
She wanted to feel like herself again.
Behind her, Raj snored on, oblivious. Bruno wove between her ankles, purring, and Ruby took a breath, held it, let it out.
Tomorrow, she would make a decision. Tomorrow, she would figure out what came next.
But tonight, in the dark, she let herself want. It was enough. It was a start.