Susan and Jen had built everything together — the house, the marriage, the future they were certain was coming. Then grief moved in, and neither of them knew how to ask the other for help.

They had been through the kind of loss that doesn't have a clean ending — the kind you carry in your body, that sits with you on the couch in silence, that makes you lie awake in the dark with nothing left to say and no way to begin.

Susan didn't leave because she stopped loving Jen. She left because 'like attending a play, she was in the audience of her life' — watching herself be someone she no longer recognised, in a house that held the shape of every hope that hadn't come true. The silence between them deepened. The next day, Susan fled.