My wife started coming home after 9 p.m. with strange marks on her wrists – so I showed up unannounced at her office one evening

“Oh, it’s probably because of a hair tie, darling,” she said. “Let me go see Lena. I’ll be right back.”

I agreed, but something didn’t add up. I’ve never seen a tie leave such wide marks. Or such deep ones. And the worst part?

They didn’t disappear. Not for days. I kept looking, checking when she wasn’t paying attention, and they were still there, but fainter. A dull, persistent imprint.

So, one evening, I made a choice.

I picked Lena up from school and took her to my mom’s, telling her she was going to have a nice sleepover. I told her we’d organized everything at the last minute, and Mom didn’t ask any questions.  She never asks questions.

Then I drove to Nara’s office.

The building was almost empty. Just a cleaning crew dragging mops through the silent corridors and the security guard at the entrance, who smiled and gestured for me to go through the turnstile when I said, “I’m Nara’s husband.”

“I know, Jonathan!” he told me. “We met at the company picnic, remember?”

That smile haunted me for one reason or another, as if it knew something I didn’t. Or perhaps I was simply looking for signs where there were none.

As I walked towards the corridor, the atmosphere changed. Fluorescent lights hummed above me, dim but persistent, and my footsteps echoed louder than they should have. Everything felt off, too clean, too quiet.

This kind of silence doesn’t calm you down, but tells you that something is…  abnormal .

Like a doctor’s office before bad news.

Then I heard it.  Laughter.

Soft, muffled sounds, then followed by a faint hum of conversation. It was coming from the end of the corridor. Nara’s office. The blinds were drawn, which immediately struck me; she hated enclosed spaces.

“They make me feel like I’m in a cage, Jon,” she had said. “I need high ceilings and open floors!”

I slowed down; my heart was beating so hard it felt like it was pressing against my throat.

I knocked. Nothing. I tried the handle. It was locked.

Then I heard her voice behind the door, muffled but undoubtedly that of my wife.

“Who is there?” she asked.

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I stayed there, my hand frozen on the metal handle, staring at it as if it could turn back time.

Finally, the lock clicked. The door creaked open.

And she was there.

Nara.

Wide eyes. Pale face. The kind of expression you give to someone you weren’t expecting and perhaps didn’t want to see.

Behind her, two colleagues stood awkwardly, Sanjay and Amira, I think. Papers and graphs were scattered on the table, a laptop was still projecting data onto the wall.

She turned to them and said, her voice tight.

“Guys… can we wrap this up tomorrow morning?”

They nodded without a word and slipped in front of me.

Only we remained.

I took a step inside.

The door closed behind me, stifled by the final, and suddenly the silence seemed unbearable.

I was very aware of my own breathing, of the noise it made in the silence, as if it didn’t belong in the room.

The projector’s glow cast faint graphs onto the walls—charts, acronyms for well-being measures I didn’t recognize. One of the graphs was red, then turned green. It was the kind of display Nara could explain in ten seconds.

I stared at him as if he might confess something to me if I looked at him long enough.

My wife returned to the table slowly, as if her legs had forgotten how to move naturally. She gathered some loose sheets of paper into a pile, but her hands were trembling.

Not much, just enough for me to see it.

“There’s orange chicken here, Jon,” she said. “Sanjay ordered it.”

“I’m not hungry, Nara,” I said. “I just wanted to… find out more.”

She turned around and gathered more paper.