My husband didn’t know I spoke Japanese. The night I sat across from him at a glittering San Francisco restaurant, pretending not to understand a single word while he dismantled our entire marriage in front of a foreign executive, my life split cleanly into “before” and “after.”
He thought I was just there to look pretty. He had no idea I understood every sentence.
From the outside, our life in the Bay Area looked like something you’d see in a real estate brochure. My name is Sarah, and for twelve years I thought I had a good marriage. Not perfect, not movie-level passionate, but solid. Respectable. We lived in a narrow townhouse in Mountain View with a tiny strip of grass out front and a maple tree that turned a fierce red every October. On clear days, you could see the hills if you craned your neck from the upstairs window. On foggy mornings, the world felt like it began and ended at the cul-de-sac.
David worked as a senior manager at a tech company off Highway 101, in one of those mirrored buildings where people wore badges and talked about “runway” and “burn rates” and “Q4 targets.” I worked as a marketing coordinator at a smaller firm in Palo Alto—steady, unglamorous, the kind of job that didn’t make anyone gasp with excitement at dinner parties, but kept the lights on and gave me a reason to put on real clothes in the morning.
We had routines. Coffee from the same local café on Saturday mornings. Occasional dinners in downtown Mountain View. Once a year, if we’d had a good financial year, we went somewhere slightly nicer: Maui, Vancouver, maybe New York in December with the Rockefeller tree and tourists taking photos in puffy coats. We smiled in pictures. We sent holiday cards. People said things like, “You two are such a stable couple.”
Looking back, I’m not sure when that stability turned into something quieter and colder.
When we first met, David had been attentive in a way that made me feel chosen. We met at a mutual friend’s barbecue in Sunnyvale. I remember him standing by the grill in a Stanford hoodie, telling a story about a failed product launch at his old company. He was animated, funny, clearly smart. Later, when he asked for my number, I went home and told my roommate, “I think this one might actually go somewhere.”
For the first few years, it did. We tried new restaurants, took long drives down Highway 1 with the windows down and the ocean roaring below. We stayed up late talking about our families, our childhoods, in that way people do when they still believe they’re building something together.
Then he got his big promotion. New title. Bigger office. Stock options. The kind of thing people in the Bay Area bragged about in hushed, reverent tones.
After that, everything shifted by degrees.
He started coming home later. First it was one or two nights a week, then three, then most nights. His phone lived in his hand. He stopped asking about my day and started talking at me about his, the monologues long and the questions back to me almost nonexistent. Our conversations shrank into to-do lists.
“Did you pay the PG&E bill?”
“Don’t forget my suit at the dry cleaners.”
“They moved the leadership off-site to Napa; I’ll be gone three days next week.”
Sometimes I’d sit at the tiny dining room table, eating alone while he worked in his home office with the door half-shut, the blue rectangle of his laptop light spilling into the hallway. The TV would murmur in the background for company. I told myself this was normal, this was adulthood, this was marriage.
But the invisible space between us got wider.
About eighteen months before that dinner, I had one of those restless nights where sleep wouldn’t come. David was snoring lightly beside me, the soft white noise machine on his side of the bed humming like distant waves. Outside, a Caltrain horn sounded faintly in the distance. I picked up my phone, dimmed the screen, and started scrolling through nothing—email, social media, news, the usual numbness.
An ad popped up for a free trial of a language-learning app. Japanese.
It might as well have been a photograph of my younger self.
In college, back in the days of cheap coffee and thicker hair and wild certainty that life could still be anything, I’d taken a semester of Japanese. I’d been fascinated by the characters, by the way entire ideas could be compressed into a beautiful, compact symbol. I loved the way the language forced my brain to work differently. I’d daydreamed about going to Tokyo one day, walking through neon-lit streets, reading the signs without needing help.
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