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.”
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
TAP → NEXT PAGE → 👇
