Kavita lies in bed under the duvet with the cordless held up to her ear. For the several weeks, she and Nirav have ended their days this way, with a quick catch up. Already the ration of daylight is in decline. Although it’s just after six o’clock, she switches on the lamp on the nightstand, which fills the room with milky, tapering light. Outside her window, dusk tints the surroundings in a deep grey-blue, revealing the first of the stars, opalescent and winking.

Lately, their conversations seem to follow a script. There are the usual warm-up questions to rely on: How was your day? How’s the cat? What did you have for dinner? But once they exhaust these subjects, neither of them seems to know how to follow up, their chitchat encumbered by the questions that linger in their tense silences, both lacking the courage to ask them.

In the early days after Sunil’s death, the early days of their separation, when Nirav moved back to the condo, they had put some effort into their nightly conversations, constructing elaborate replies to satisfy their need to hear the other’s voice, as if the sound were a salve for their loneliness. Those conversations reminded her of the others they had endured during the arduous year they had spent apart, when they were dating long-distance.

Now, it seems as though they are facing a different kind of distance, an insidious, emotional type that has little to do with physical geography.

As she holds the receiver to her ear, she realizes that several moments have passed since either of them last spoke. The static sound of his breath brushes against the sensitive hairs of her inner ear. Just over a year ago, on their honeymoon in Jasper—a wedding present from Sunil—they soaked in the Miette hot springs with their limbs entwined and promised each other between ardent kisses to always tell each other everything without exception. She knew they would never suffer the taciturn plague that had turned her parents’ mouths black and shrivelled their voices from lack of use. Back then, she would never have believed she and Nirav were capable of such prolonged silences—silences that seemed electrified with all they hesitated to say out loud. How long ago that dizzying utopian time feels from the reticent place they occupy now.

“Kavita?” he says. “Are you still there?”

“I’m here.”

“Well?”

“I don’t know.” She gnaws on her thumbnail still unsure of how to circumvent his question.

“You’re just being paranoid, Kavita.”

“You only say that because you’re never here.”

Ten seconds tick by.

“I just want my wife back.”

“You know where I am.”

He clears his throat. This is as much as she has said about his absence in weeks. He wants me to be his wife, she thinks, but where has my husband been?