The dishes had been done for an hour, but neither of them had moved from the kitchen. Mara leaned against the counter, arms crossed loosely, watching Theo dry the same glass for the third time.
“You’re going to wear a hole in that thing,” she said, and he laughed — a real laugh, the first one all week.
They’d been circling something for months. Not a fight, exactly. More like a slow drift, the kind that happens when two people get so good at managing a household together that they forget to actually look at each other.
“I miss you,” Theo said finally, setting the glass down. “Not — I know you’re right here. I mean I miss this. Talking. Actually talking.”
Mara felt something in her chest loosen, like a knot she hadn’t realized she’d been carrying. “I thought it was just me,” she admitted. “I didn’t want to say anything and make it a whole thing.”
“It’s already a whole thing,” he said gently. “I just didn’t know how to bring it up without it sounding like an accusation.”
They ended up on the back step, the way they used to in the first year, when the apartment was too small and too loud and the porch was the only quiet place. The night air was cool. Neither of them reached for a phone.
“Tell me something you haven’t told me in a while,” Mara said.
And he did. Small things, at first — a memory from work, a thought he’d had on the drive home. Then bigger things, the kind that had been sitting unsaid for longer than either wanted to admit. She listened the way she used to, fully, without already forming her reply.
By the time they came back inside, something had shifted — not fixed, not all at once, but loosened. Reopened. Theo took her hand on the way up the stairs, and for the first time in a long time, it didn’t feel like routine. It felt like choosing each other again, deliberately, the way they had at the very beginning.
Some nights don’t need anything dramatic to happen. Sometimes what a relationship needs most is simply being asked the right question, and staying to hear the whole answer.