Hello, dear listeners. I’m pleased to welcome you to my channel and present you with a new, intriguing story from right here in the American Midwest. Make yourself comfortable.
Enjoy listening. Kiana Jenkins never considered herself suspicious. Just observant.
In her thirty‑seven years of life, she had learned one simple truth: people lie not with their words, but with their eyes and their hands—and with those tiny little pauses when a question is asked and the answer has to be invented on the spot. Darius had been lying almost constantly for the past two weeks. She first noticed it that morning when he brought her coffee in bed “just because” on a Wednesday.
Kiana opened her eyes, saw her husband standing there with a mug in his hand, and felt something inside her tighten like a guitar string. Darius never brought her coffee in bed, not even during the first year of their marriage, when they were still playing the part of lovebirds. The most he would do was grumble from the doorway,
“Get up, I boiled the kettle.”
“Why are you up so early?” she asked, propping herself up on her elbows.
He smiled too wide. “Oh, I slept great. I wanted to… surprise you.”
That momentary, barely perceptible pause before he said “surprise” was what gave him away.
Kiana took the mug and sipped the coffee. It was sweet, even though she hadn’t taken sugar in her coffee in about five years. “Thank you,” she said.
“It’s delicious.”
He left for the kitchen, whistling something cheerful, and Kiana remained sitting there, looking out the bedroom window at the gray apartment buildings and the faint outline of downtown in the distance. Outside, a fine October drizzle was falling, gray and tiresome, just like her growing anxiety. At work that day in the small construction company’s office on the edge of their midwestern city, she tried to focus on the numbers.
Accounting was a refuge for those who didn’t want to think about life. Columns, spreadsheets, reconciliation reports—the main thing was not to get distracted. But her thoughts kept buzzing around her like persistent flies.
Darius was acting strange. Not just strange—suspicious. He had become overly attentive, overly caring.
It was unusual and felt more unsettling than if he had simply been rude or hostile. On Friday, he bought her flowers, a big bouquet of white and yellow blooms wrapped in crinkly cellophane, “just because.”
Kiana took the bouquet, thanked him, and went to find a vase. Her hands were shaking.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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