Chapter 2 - The Silence in the Driveway
The drive back to our house in Hyde Park was silent save for the hum of the tires on the wet interstate. Sophie stared out the passenger window, her silhouette etched against the passing gray blur of billboards and brick storefronts. I gripped the steering wheel so hard my knuckles ached. Every mile marker felt like a nail driven into the coffin of our honeymoon phase—a phase that had lasted exactly six days before the video and the texts destroyed it.
When we pulled into our driveway, the house looked smaller than I remembered. It was a modest, two-story craftsman with a wrap-around porch that we had spent three weekends painting together before the engagement. Back then, every stroke of the brush felt like building a fortress. Now, looking at the dark windows, it felt more like a holding cell.
Sophie got out of the car before I had even put the engine in park. She didn't wait for me to help with the bags. She unlocked the front door, kicked off her heels with a sharp click against the hardwood floor, and vanished upstairs without a word.
I sat in the driver's seat for a long time, the engine ticking as it cooled. My phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out, expecting another text from Marissa or perhaps a demand from Sophie. Instead, it was an Instagram notification. A wedding page I didn't follow had reshaped the clip. *BEST GROOM REACTION EVER.* The view count was at four hundred thousand. In the thumbnail, my blindfolded face was frozen in mid-laugh, my hand resting on Kyle Morgan's hairy thigh, while a blurry sea of 140 laughing faces surrounded us like a colosseum crowd.
Nausea rolled through my stomach. I hit delete on the app, not just closing it, but scrubbing it from my phone entirely. It didn't matter. The video didn't live on my phone anymore; it lived in the ether, a permanent digital scar stamped onto the happiest day of my life.
When I finally walked upstairs with the luggage, the bedroom door was shut. A sliver of light shone underneath. I pushed it open. Sophie was sitting at her vanity, stripping away her makeup with a cotton pad, her movements rigid and mechanical.
"You can't just drop things like that," she said to my reflection in the mirror, not turning around.
"Drop what?" I set my suitcase down at the foot of the bed.
"The planning emails. Marissa called me, didn't she?"
I stopped. The air in the room grew heavy. "She didn't call me. She texted me. She sent me proof that you knew."
Sophie spun around in her chair, the cotton pad clenched in her fist. Her eyes flashed with sudden, sharp anger. "Proof? Good God, Ethan, listen to yourself! You're talking about wedding planning like it's a criminal conspiracy! I talked to Marissa about three different garter prank ideas. One was a stripper coming out of a cake—which I vetoed because I thought it was tacky. One was a guy dressed in a gorilla suit. And the third was Kyle."
"And you picked the one where your husband gets publicly humiliated while blindfolded," I said, my voice dropping into a dangerous, icy register.
"I picked the one that was funny!" she shouted, standing up. The sound echoed off the high ceilings of our bedroom. "Everyone does it! My brother had his best friend swap in for his garter toss, and they laughed about it for a year! Why are you acting like I tried to destroy you?"
"Because you *did* destroy something, Sophie!" I took a step toward her, the frustration finally breaking through my restraint. "You made me the butt of the joke in front of my mother, my boss, my entire family. And the worst part isn't that you did it. The worst part is that when I took off that blindfold and felt my stomach drop into my shoes—when I saw 140 people pointing phones at me—you weren't looking at me with sympathy. You weren't worried about my feelings. You were laughing harder than anyone else."
She recoiled as if I had struck her. Her lips parted, but for a moment, no words came out. The silence stretched between us, thick and suffocating, filled with the hum of the refrigerator downstairs and the ticking of the clock on the nightstand.
"It was a joke, Ethan," she whispered, her voice trembling. "It was supposed to be a fun, memorable moment at our wedding."
"Well, it's memorable," I said, turning away from her and walking toward the door. "Congratulations. We'll never forget it."
"Where are you going?" she called out as I stepped into the hallway.
"I'm sleeping in the guest room."
"Ethan, don't be ridiculous—"
"Goodnight, Sophie."
May you like
I closed the door behind me, locking myself in a room that smelled faintly of old dust and fabric softener, leaving my wife on the other side of a divide neither of us knew how to cross.
***
