What We don’t Say

What We Don’t Say

“I don’t understand,” she said.

Three words. Just five syllables. But they landed like stones on the quiet surface of our kitchen, rippling through everything we hadn’t said in weeks.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know how.

Instead, I looked down at my coffee, which had grown cold and bitter, much like us. The fluorescent light above us buzzed in that annoying way, casting a faint halo over her bent head and mine. The kitchen table between us was small, but it exaggerated the gulf that separated us.

She waited, eyes looking anywhere but at me with her jaw set in that tight way that meant she was holding something in. She had taken to doing that lately—guarding her face like a locked door. I used to have the key. Now I wasn’t sure there was even a lock.

So, we sat silently—two people occupying the same space and not much else.

I focused on the wood grain of the table. I’d refinished it myself many years ago, in another, happier time — the summer she wanted everything in the house to feel more “us.” We’d painted walls, changed curtains, bought rugs. Made this little place our home.

Now this felt like someone else’s kitchen.

“I don’t understand,” she repeated, softer this time. “What happened to us? How did we get here?”

I could have answered in many different ways. I could have listed the last six months like a calendar of slow-motion disasters. I could have said, it started the day we stopped talking about the hard things. Or maybe even further back—the day we started pretending everything was fine, just to make it through another morning. But none of those things seemed like enough. Or maybe they were too much. I could have said many things. Instead, I said nothing.

She finally looked at me. Her eyes were tired. Not from lack of sleep, though there had been plenty of that for both of us. Both of us are tired in the way you get when you carry something too long, and your arms forget what it feels like to let go.

“I keep thinking it’s a dream,” she said. “Or a trick of memory. Like maybe if I try hard enough, I can remember a version of this that ends differently.”

“What version is that?” I asked.

She gave a hollow laugh. “The one where we get through it. Where we’re still us at the end.”

We used to be good at hard things. We used to face them together—shoulder to shoulder, back to back. I remember the year of the leaking roof after a heavy, wet snowstorm. We spent the night catching water in buckets and cans, cursing, laughing, exhausted, and soaked through.

I remember the miscarriage, too—the second one. The one that nearly broke her. How she curled around herself like a seashell, and I held her through the night like I could stop the tide from taking her.

But this—whatever this was—felt different. It didn’t come with a loud bang or a hospital room or a wet floor. It just arrived slowly, like a dense fog. It seeped in through cracks we didn’t know were there.

“I was scared,” I said finally.

She blinked, her mouth parting like she hadn’t expected me to speak. “You still are.”

I nodded. There was no point in pretending. “I was afraid to say anything. I still am. I was afraid that saying anything would make it real.”

She nodded slowly, her hands still around her mug. “And not saying it… did that help?”

“No.” My voice cracked. “It just made me feel alone.”

Her breath caught, but she slowly released it. I watched the tiny shifts in her face like weather moving across the sky. I used to be able to read those expressions, but now I wasn’t sure if I was even speaking the right language.

“I’ve been angry,” she said after a while. “But I’m mostly just… confused. Like I woke up in a life I don’t remember choosing.”

I rubbed my temples. “Do you still want it?”

She hesitated. “I want us, but what does ‘us’ even mean anymore?”

The clock on the wall ticked loudly, filling the silence between us. It was like a metaphor for what our lives had become.

I thought of the appointment card still buried in my jacket pocket, the one I hadn’t shown her yet. The one with the name of a specialist and a date circled in blue ink. I thought about how she’d once cried in my arms after a phone call from her sister, whispering, They don’t know what it’s like—not really unless you’ve been there. I didn’t know either. Not really. But I’d pretended I did, to be strong for her.

I wasn’t strong. Not now.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “For not being better at this. For not knowing how to help.”

Her eyes welled up, and she looked away, blinking hard. “You think I know how to do this? I’m just… I’m just trying to hold it together long enough to figure out what the hell I’m even feeling.”

And then she added something I didn’t expect:

“Sometimes, I wonder if it would have been easier if it were something else. A death. A diagnosis. Something that made sense.”

I knew what she meant. It was easier to rally around a tragedy you could name. But this wasn’t that. This was uncertainty and grief that had no headline. We hadn’t lost anything you could bury, but we were grieving all the same.

“We could still talk to someone,” I offered. “Together, I mean.”

She didn’t respond right away. Just traced a slow line around the rim of her mug.

“I’ve thought about it,” she said eventually. “But I’m afraid they’ll ask the question I’ve been avoiding.”

“What’s that?”

Her voice was quiet. “Do you want to stay?”

I looked at her. Really looked for the first time in a long time. I looked at the woman who danced barefoot in our first apartment kitchen, twirling in a haze of flour and joy. The woman who ran her fingers through my hair when I was upset. The woman who stayed up all night sewing a silly Halloween costume for our godson because she didn’t want him to feel left out. She was still here. Changed, maybe. Hurt, yes. But here.

“I do,” I said.

She searched my face. “Even if we can’t fix it?”

“Yes.” I reached out slowly and placed my hand palm-up on the table. “Even if all we do is try.”

Her eyes flicked to my hand. Then, after a long pause, she reached out too. Her fingers brushed mine, uncertain, tentative, but she didn’t pull away.

We stayed like that, our fingertips touching, while the coffee grew colder and the light dimmed into early evening.

Outside, the world moved on. A bird flew past the window. A car door slammed somewhere down the block. Life continued, indifferent and steady.

Inside, we sat in silence, in not knowing, or understanding.

But we were no longer facing that unknown alone.