His role as a husband sprouts to fruition when he trots to work. Snagging hard-earned money to upthrust his family from financial debt is his objective. Well—was his objective.

At any hour warm roses to cobalt blues bleach the welkin, subsisting is all he aims for. To muddle through the waking hours without drowning in his, his wife's, and his wife's friends' problems. What's next? The entire neighborhood?

Shouldering the burden, he found, eases when attentive ears nurses to his rants. No, it's not a therapist.

"I can't keep doing this anymore." His tongue, gaining free will, ejected. To that, your chewing abruptly lapsed into the quiet where breaths itself conversed.

He's done it again. Moved his mouth zippier than he can engineer a coherent thought. "Forget it," tingled his throat, itching to gulp the syllables residing in the air. "Can't do what?" Intrigue coats your tone—curiosity that he aroused, hence can't take back.

He sighed. Diverting your interest from the meal to him during your unpaid break time ignited guilt, but he voiced, "This whole thing with my wife and her friends," before it ensnared his tongue.

"There's no escaping. They keep dragging us back to their nightmare."

"Nightmare?" you quirk a probing brow, and he halts. Reconsiders. "Stuff from the past."

"We've tried to move on, then when we're making progress, something... undoes those efforts. I'm so tired of it—living in fear, the secrets, the lies... The worst thing, though? It doesn't feel like we're in this together. Like Shauna doesn't care I'm outside looking in, always the last to know."

"I just..." his voice droops, a whispered plead, "wanted a normal life with our daughter."

Quiet girdles the establishment. Then, something else entirely. Too hefty to be mistaken for a flimsy tissue, too warm-blooded to be likened to the table—your hand. A caressing thumb over his knuckle, his ring. Too tenderly intimate between coworkers. Boss and employee.

You pull away, but the touch lingers. Like he longs for it. He gulps.