Page 31 of The Weight of Her Silence
Still, it gave her peace to know her voice would not disappear with her body. She would speak to them through paper, through ink, through memory.
Even when Nate could not give them the truth, she would.
Nate
He came home late. Lila was already asleep—or pretending to be. The lights were off, the room thick with silence.
He undressed quietly, guilt gnawing at the back of his mind for no particular reason. Just a dull awareness that he was never here when he should be.
That something was off.
He looked at her in bed, the curve of her back under the blanket, the way she curled in on herself like something trying to disappear.
He didn’t know what she was thinking. He never asked. But something inside him whispered: She’s slipping away and he didn’t know if that meant emotionally or physically.
He just knew it was happening and he still couldn’t stop himself from seeing Camille the next night.
Chapter 26
The Things We Pretend Not to See
Caleb wasn’t supposed to be awake. It was after 11 p.m., the house quiet except for the low murmur of the television downstairs. Caleb sat at the top of the staircase, his thin arms wrapped around his knees, socks too big for his feet bunched around his ankles. The blue light from the screen flickered against the walls, shadows moving like restless ghosts.
He didn’t mean to spy but this wasn’t the first night his father had come home late and it wasn’t the first time his mother had gone to bed early—face pale, breath shallow, a tension in her that hadn’t always been there.
He watched Nate walk into the kitchen, loosen his tie, then pour himself a drink.
A drink.
It wasn’t the drink that bothered Caleb. It was the shirt. He had seen it before, just this morning. Crisp, pale gray with tiny silver cufflinks—the kind his mom gave him for their anniversary two years ago. The shirt had been clean. The cufflinks were there.
But now… now the shirt looked wrinkled, the top button missing. And the cufflinks?Gone.That wasn’t a day at the office. That was something else.
Nate stood in the kitchen, phone pressed to his ear, voice low but hurried. Caleb crawled down a step. He didn’t need to hear everything to know.
“…I told you I couldn’t tonight,” Nate said.
“He was still awake… yeah, I know, I miss you too…”
A pause.
Then a quiet, almost pleading whisper:
“Tomorrow. I’ll make it happen. I just need to handle things here.”
Caleb’s stomach twisted.
The lie was not in the words. It was in the way his father said them—soft, secretive, like someone who had done it a hundred times and didn’t believe he could be caught.
But he had been.
Caught, quietly, by an eleven-year-old boy in socks too big and eyes too sharp.
Nate
The next morning, Nate found Caleb in the kitchen, sitting at the counter with a bowl of dry cereal he hadn’t touched.
“Morning, bud,” he said casually, ruffling the boy’s hair.
