Endurance

Three months after the explosion—wedding vows detonated and public humiliation shrapnel embedded in every family photo—Marsha Lewis sits in the living room, hands trembling over a stainless florist’s blade and a heap of white tulips. She snaps the stem of each flower at a perfect diagonal, lines the cut ends in a crystal pitcher, and ignores the way her own breathing disturbs the arrangement’s fragile order. The television is on but muted. The couch still bears the imprint of Michael’s last visit, a pit where her son’s anger sat for the length of a strained apology and then left, the air stripped of oxygen in its wake.

The house smells faintly of bleach and green stems, the aftermath of her weekly clean. Today the sunlight is watery and blue, painting a thin sheet of glare across the photo gallery above the mantel: Michael in cross-country glory, Mitchell at the finish line in a suit and windbreaker, herself in a rare moment of genuine laughter, head thrown back at some forgotten joke. She can’t look at them long.

Marsha dabs at her eyes with a knuckle, aware that the skin is already raw from too many days of tears and too few nights of sleep. Her hands have not stopped shaking since the first morning after the wedding, when she realized the silence at the breakfast table was permanent, not just a momentary reprieve from the arguments.

She does not hear Mitchell enter, but she feels it—a ripple in the atmosphere, a shift in barometric pressure. He moves quietly, years of distance running having trained him to approach even domestic disasters with stealth and endurance. When she turns, he stands just inside the doorway, arms folded across his chest, posture so precise it almost looks painful. Mitchell’s eyes, always a soft brown, have been leached to flint. His face is clean-shaven, the lines at the corners of his mouth deepened by the habit of holding everything back.

Marsha looks at him for a long second, and in that interval she hopes—absurdly—that maybe he’ll say something ordinary: that The Final Stretch had a banner holiday sale, or that the sidewalk out front is finally cleared. Instead, Mitchell breaks the silence with three words, each one as deliberate as a race gun:

“How long, Marsha?”

The words land heavy, but she’s rehearsed this. She wipes her fingers on her apron, sets down the blade, and turns fully to him. “You mean with Lawrence,” she says, voice barely above a whisper.

He doesn’t nod, but his jaw clenches so hard she hears the pop. “I want the truth,” he says, steady as a metronome.

She exhales, shoulders curling forward as if protecting her ribcage from the next impact. “It was a year ago. Maybe a little more. After that night, the dinner at the Beeks’—”

“New Year’s?” Mitchell’s voice is flat, betraying no emotion. Only the vein in his temple, pulsing once, gives him away.

“Yes.” Marsha’s fingers find the edge of the kitchen towel, twist it into a white rope. “We… I didn’t plan it. We just talked, and I felt—” Her words break, and she can’t finish the sentence.

“You felt what?” Mitchell prompts, gentler now, but no less relentless.

She presses the heels of her hands into her eyes. “I felt invisible. Alone. Even in a room with all of you.” She breathes in, steadies herself. “Lawrence was just there. It wasn’t supposed to mean anything.”

He watches her, stone-faced, but internally the calculations are running, all the possible reactions queued up and shot down before they reach his lips. “You know how hard I’ve worked for this family,” he says finally, quiet but firm. “For you.”

“I know.” She hates the whimper in her own voice. “You never stopped providing, not once. You always put Michael and me first. I just—” Marsha swallows, the old embarrassment washing over her. “I wanted to feel… seen.”

Mitchell moves to the armchair, grips the back with both hands. His knuckles whiten, but he doesn’t raise his voice. “Do you think I never wanted to be seen, Marsha? I built everything for us. For you. For him.” He nods toward the photos. “If you were lonely, you could have told me.”

She wipes her nose, tries to meet his eyes but can’t. “You were always so strong. I thought it would make you hate me. I thought it would break us.”

He laughs once, low and bitter. “That’s the thing about distance runners. We’re used to pain. We expect it.” He looks away, out the front window at the patches of snow still clinging to the lawn. “But we finish the damn race.”

There is a silence that seems to go on forever, a silence filled with all the words they never said and all the years they can’t get back. Marsha wants to apologize again, but she knows how cheap the word sounds after so many repetitions. Instead, she asks, “Are you going to leave?”

Mitchell lets go of the chair, releases his grip finger by finger. “I don’t know,” he says, and the honesty in it stings worse than anything else. “But I needed to hear the truth from you. Not from Michael, not from anyone else.”

She nods, and tears slide down her face, unimpeded. She returns to the tulips, lines them up, tries to restore order to something—anything—in her life. Mitchell stands in the doorway a few seconds longer, then turns and walks away, the sound of his retreat barely louder than her own heartbeat.

The sunlight has shifted on the wall, illuminating the dust motes and the tears alike. Marsha arranges the flowers, one by one, as if the ritual can somehow bind the pieces of her world back together.

The confrontation might have ended there, the damage done and each party dismissed to their corners, but the house is too small and the pain too fresh to grant such easy absolution. Marsha doesn’t hear Mitchell return, only senses his presence behind her, a solid wall of intent and disappointment. She tries to focus on the tulips—on the green-flecked lips of the petals, on the gentle rasp of stem against glass—but her hands shake so badly that a droplet of water trembles off the vase and spatters onto her jeans.

Mitchell stands by the bay window, hands in his pockets, shoulders thrown back as if the posture alone can keep him upright. The sunlight cuts through the glass, splitting his reflection into fractured panes. He doesn’t look at her directly, but his words are sharp enough to find their target.

“Was it just the one time?” he asks, not unkindly, but with a desperation that cracks the surface of his composure.

Marsha flinches. “No,” she says, so quietly she wonders if he’ll even catch it. “It happened more than once. We would… meet, sometimes. At his office. At the hotel near O’Hare.”

She expects an explosion—righteous, volcanic, the kind that would validate all her fears about what men do when they’re betrayed. Instead, Mitchell simply nods, gaze fixed on the neighbor’s blue recycling bin across the street. “How did Michael know?”

The question is a knife, and she almost lies. But she owes him this. “He caught us together. Lawrence threatened to cancel the wedding if he told anyone, but I...” Marsha pauses, hesitating to continue.

Mitchell closes his eyes, draws a long breath. The exhaustion is visible in the way his chest rises and falls, in the lines grooved deep into his forehead. He turns at last to face her, and for the first time in months, his eyes are not angry, only sad.

“Why Lawrence?” he asks, and the question carries an entire world of bewilderment.

Marsha shrugs, wipes her palms on her thighs. “I don’t know. He was… attentive. He listened. He made me feel—” She laughs, a short, ugly sound. “Wanted, I guess. Important.”

Mitchell shakes his head, slow and disbelieving. “All these years, Marsha. All these goddamn years. And you thought I didn’t want you?”

“I thought you wanted something… someone else.” She’s not crying now, only cold and empty. “I thought maybe you’d rather be with someone like Lucille. Someone who understands you.”

He blinks, thrown off balance. “Lucille?” The name hangs in the air, ludicrous and somehow tragic. “She’s happily married. She’s like a sister to me. Where did you even—” He stops, sees the answer written in her face.

“I heard you talking. You said she was the only person who really got you.” Marsha lets the accusation settle, ashamed even as she speaks it. “I know it’s stupid. I know it’s not logical. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

Mitchell sags against the window frame, the fight leaving his body all at once. “You really thought I’d leave you for her?”

She nods. “You always looked so alive with her. You never looked at me that way.”

He snorts, and for a second there’s a glimmer of the man she once knew. “You’re wrong, Marsha. So wrong.” He doesn’t elaborate. Instead, he turns to the mantel, picks up a picture—Michael at age nine, covered in dirt after his first 10K—and sets it gently back in place. “Do you love him?”

The question lands with a thud, and Marsha shakes her head, hair swinging over her eyes. “No. It wasn’t love. It was… escape. It was feeling like I still mattered to someone.”

Mitchell’s voice drops to a whisper, every word weighted with years of history. “You mattered to me. You always did.” He glances at the flowers, then at her, and the sorrow in his expression is almost too much to bear. “I was the only validation you ever needed. I wish you’d believed that.”

She wants to go to him, to touch his hand or rest her head on his shoulder, but the chasm between them is too wide, and she’s too tired to bridge it. Instead, she stands perfectly still as he walks away again, this time for good, his footsteps echoing down the hall and then vanishing behind the closed door of the den.

Marsha waits until the quiet grows unbearable, until the only sound is the faint hum of the refrigerator and the tick of the kitchen clock. She slumps into the nearest chair, lets the full weight of her grief settle on her shoulders, and weeps into her hands, the sobs wracking her body until she can barely breathe.

The living room, sunlit and clean, is filled with flowers—orchids, hyacinths, tulips, lilies—all of them bright and beautiful, but none of them enough to mask the stink of loss. The photos on the mantel watch her, silent witnesses to a life unraveled, as Marsha finally allows herself to mourn everything she’s destroyed.