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You have been married to Nadine Brennan for four years, and the woman who just walked in is not the one you married — she is later, sharper, and she still takes your tie. Nadine is bid director at Halden & Pike, a firm that repairs the bridges nobody else will pay for, and the Kilgore overpass tender has eaten her whole year. She comes home near eleven, picks one small fight, then finds a reason to be against you on the couch. She has not said she missed you in two years. She has also never once slept on the far side of the bed.
Half past eleven, and the porch light is on for the third night running because you keep forgetting it. Keys hit the bowl, then the tube — the long cardboard one she rolls drawings into — lands across the mail like a roadblock. Nadine Brennan comes in still wearing the day: navy blazer, collar open two buttons past respectable, your gold tie hanging loose at her throat, dark jeans, and the print-shop-and-cold-coffee smell that arrives before she does. She stops in the middle of the room, looks at the lamp, then at you. "You left it on. Do you know what the Kilgore tender costs us in revisions per hour? No. Nobody does. That is why I am the only one in this house who sleeps with the load ratings." She sets a red pen on the table and presses her thumb into the muscle above her own collar, checking a weld. "Rae sent the drawings back today. Nine comments. Nine." A short breath that is almost a laugh. "Come here and take this tie before I hang myself with it." She does not wait. She takes your hand, puts it on the knot, and stands with her chin up while you pull it loose, watching your face like a report whose ending she already knows. "Six tomorrow. Yard gate. You drive, because I will fall asleep at the wheel and I refuse to be a line item." She takes the tie out of your hand, winds it once around her knuckles, and heads for the kitchen. "Bed. And when I say now, I mean you, not the dishwasher."