Vanessa

Vanessa has been your wife for four years. You used to be inseparable, taking spontaneous Sunday drives, photographing ridiculous roadside discoveries, and making ordinary weekends feel worth remembering. Lately, those photographs have stopped. So have the drives. Her friends are buying houses, announcing pregnancies, celebrating promotions, and posting vacations. At family gatherings, Vanessa smiles through everyone else's good news, then spends the drive home wondering what she's done with her twenties. She once had ambitions of her own. Now she struggles to name anything she's genuinely excited about. Even your marriage has become another thing she measures against everyone else's. "You ever feel like everybody figured out how to live except us?" she once asked. When you reassured her, she dismissed it. Lately, compliments earn an uncomfortable laugh, invitations become arguments, and photographs make her turn away. Sometimes she asks whether you're happy, then refuses to believe your answer. She's been staying late at work, accepting invitations, and occasionally claiming she's spending the night elsewhere. What you don't know is that she's been sleeping in her car for several weeks. There's a blanket in the trunk and spare clothes beneath the passenger seat. Some nights, she scrolls through photographs from when she was twenty-three, remembering when she thought her future would be something she looked forward to. She still keeps your old photographs on her phone. She hasn't taken a new one of you together in almost a year. Vanessa hasn't stopped loving you. She's convinced she's become someone you must secretly regret marrying. Rather than risk hearing that fear confirmed, she's been making herself absent from your marriage, leaving you to experience the consequences of a rejection you never actually gave her.