After My Husband Drugged Me

The name slipped out of my mouth wrong on a Tuesday.

Nathan was talking about our anniversary, some restaurant reservation he wanted to change. "The place where I proposed," he said, like that would jog something loose in me.

I opened my mouth. Nothing came.

"The one on Christopher Street," he said, slower now, watching me the way you'd watch a glass wobble near the edge of a table.

"Right," I said. "That one."

I didn't know which one he meant. I still don't, writing this down. There's a hole where the name should be, clean-edged, like something scooped out with a spoon.

He didn't push. He just looked at me a beat too long, then went back to his phone.

The coffee thing happened three days later. I'd made it a thousand times. Black, two sugars, stirred clockwise because he said counterclockwise made it taste "off," which was ridiculous, but I'd stopped arguing about it years ago. That morning I handed him a mug and he stared into it like I'd handed him dirt.

"This is black," he said. "No sugar."

"Is it?" I looked at the mug too. It looked fine to me. "Sorry. I'll fix it."

"You've made my coffee every morning for seven years, Sloane."

I heard something in his voice. Not anger. Something thinner than anger.

"I guess I was thinking about something else," I said, and I fixed it, and he drank it without another word, but his eyes kept sliding to me over the rim of the mug like I was a word he couldn't spell anymore.

The Santorini photos came out that weekend. He'd pulled them up on the tablet, propped it against the fruit bowl while I made dinner. White buildings. Blue domes. A woman in a yellow dress laughing on a boat, sunburned across the nose.

"Remember this?" he said.

I looked at her for a long time. She looked happy. She looked like she belonged somewhere warm and easy.

"Where is this?" I asked.

He went very still. "Santorini. Our honeymoon. Sloane, that's you."

I tilted my head. It didn't feel like me. It felt like flipping through someone's vacation album at a garage sale, mildly pleasant, entirely unclaimed. "Pretty dress," I said, and went back to the stove.

Behind me, I heard him set the tablet down too hard.

He started staying out later after that. Lab work, he said. A grant deadline. I didn't ask questions, because questions require caring about the answer, and caring had started to feel like a language I used to speak fluently and now only half-remembered, the way you lose a language you learned as a child.

I was on the couch one night, scrolling through my phone with the television murmuring at me, when I saw the photo. A gala. String lights, a marble staircase, Nathan in a charcoal suit I didn't recognize, standing close beside a woman with sharp cheekbones and a dress the color of red wine.

**My favorite neuroscientist ☕**

The caption sat under the photo like a little dare.

I looked at the woman's face. Nothing in me reached for it. No sting, no ache, no name rising up to meet her. She was pretty. The lighting was good. Nathan looked handsome, the way he always did in photos, chin tucked slightly to hide the start of a double chin he was paranoid about.

I tapped the heart with my thumb, the same way I'd like a stranger's sunset or someone's dog in a sweater, and I kept scrolling.

Twenty minutes later, Nathan's phone rang in the kitchen. He picked it up fast, like he'd been waiting.

"Hey—" he started, and then his voice dropped into something clipped and low. I wasn't trying to listen. The apartment just carried sound that way, especially at night, especially when someone was trying not to be heard.

"Paloma. Paloma, calm down." A pause. "She what?" Another pause, longer. "No. No, I don't know why she— it doesn't mean anything, it's just a like, people like everything—"

His voice kept climbing and folding on itself. I caught the shape of his shoulders through the doorway, hunched over the counter, one hand pressed flat against his own forehead like he was checking for a fever.

"I have to go," he said finally, and hung up, and stood there a long moment before he noticed me watching from the couch.

"Everything okay?" I asked. It felt like the polite thing to say.

He looked at me the way you look at a door you're not sure is locked. "Fine," he said. "Lab stuff."

"Okay," I said, and turned back to the television, and I meant it. I really didn't care.

Somewhere underneath the not-caring, small and far away, I noticed that I used to. I just couldn't remember why.