Then one evening I came home, and Paul was gone. His Ford Escape wasn’t in the driveway. Ashley was staying over at her friend Julie’s again. It took me a good two hours to realize Paul had moved out. It wasn’t until I opened our closet that I realized something was amiss. I then wandered into the ensuite and noticed his toothbrush, razor, and shaving cream were gone. He had taken just the bare essentials. A single carload. He texted me later that night to say he would be staying with his friend Nathan for a few nights while we figured out what would happen next. I liked that ‘we’ in his text message, as if it was going to be some kind of conversation or negotiation between us.

Apparently, he and Ashley had already discussed all of it, which frankly just felt cruel, but I suppose from Paul’s perspective I was acting unilaterally without consultation, so he felt at liberty to do the same. He later told me that he hadn’t wanted to have some big showdown with me and felt that this was the gentlest way for everyone. Ashley had refused to move out; she liked her room, and there was too much on her plate with school and soccer to contemplate uprooting. A part of me couldn’t help but wonder whether Paul actually asked her to stay, to keep an eye on me. In the end, Paul lived with Nathan’s family for two weeks before finding a small studio apartment by the Home Depot, in a generic new-build with views of parking lot all around. I told myself it was a temporary solution. After nearly two decades of marriage, you don’t throw in the towel after a few bad months, or even a bad year. That wasn’t Paul’s nature. But then what did I know about nature? Was anything I had been doing in my nature?

Nature in Revolt. Those were the words on the news chyron one night, regarding the historically high temperatures that spring, and how it was affecting mating seasons, and migrations, and aquifer levels, and forest fires. Perhaps my nature was in revolt. Or perhaps my nature had always been revolt.

I couldn’t help but feel, around this time, that the news chyron spoke of a larger disquiet that was settling over the neighbourhood; a sense of unrest that made itself known in small and innocuous ways. Shopping carts tipped over in empty parking lots. A burned-out couch just off the bike path. Foxes copulating in driveways. As I jogged past neighbours’ homes in the early morning, and glimpsed them in their bedrooms getting dressed, or in their kitchens eating breakfast, it occurred to me that The Hum was working on people’s minds and bodies whether they realized it or not. It was affecting their moods, their digestion, their sex life, the way they felt about their husbands and wives and kids. One night, from my bedroom window, I watched our backyard neighbour swimming laps back and forth underneath his pool cover. He must have been at it for an hour. I kept wondering—what happens if he got caught under there? Who would save him? It would take me at least five minutes to run downstairs, pull on some shoes, and dash around the block to his front door, and then who would open the door for me, I wasn’t even sure anyone else was home. People probably had no idea why they were doing half of what they did.