I should have just left it then. I should have stood up, fixed my hair, and walked back up to bed. I should have folded myself into Paul’s warmth, closed my eyes, and put it out of my mind. That would have been the end of it, and my life would have stayed as it always had. But it was already too late. It had gotten under my skin. And believe me when I say that I’m not an obsessive person. I don’t fuss about details. I’m not a perfectionist. I couldn’t give a shit if the house is spotless, even for company. I’m usually very laid-back, in fact too much so sometimes for Paul’s liking (or the liking of his parents). But for some reason I just couldn’t let it go. A part of me was probably thinking that the sound indicated some issue with the house, which was still relatively new, and slapped-up quickly like all tract housing, and Paul was constantly finding problems with the pipes, or the air ducts, or the seals around the windows, which drove him crazy as he was always fastidious with his own work. But, if I’m honest, it went much deeper than that. The sound unnerved me. There was just something about it that wasn’t right, that wasn’t like any other bit of white noise I’d heard before, and I knew it would keep me up until I figured out what it was.

I’ll be up in a minute, I called back.

But I wasn’t. I stalked around the house for another two hours, long after Paul had given up on me and fallen asleep. I moved around in the dark, navigating furniture through muscle memory, stopping every so often to hold my breath and make myself as quiet as possible. The noise persisted, low and droning, with very little variation or modulation. Sometimes I thought I detected a slight bend in pitch, but then I think I was simply focusing on it too intently. I searched the living room, the basement, the garage, unplugging every appliance, the Wi-Fi router, the microwave, the TV, the hot water heater, gutting the smoke detectors of their batteries. At one point I even flipped the breaker. As I did, I suddenly remembered being six, and losing power in a lightning storm. There was something revelatory about the silence that followed. I never considered that our apartment had a nervous system, or that it whined so loudly. I marvelled that there were sounds we could only perceive in their absence, and found it unsettling to realize how much I had managed to condition myself not to hear. How much I had to tune out just to get by.