Chapter 2 - The Husband Who Never Touched Me
The first week of our marriage passed in silence.
Elias rose before dawn.
He fed the cattle, repaired fences, chopped wood, and disappeared into the snow for hours at a time. When he returned, his plaid shirt smelled of smoke, pine, and cold air.
I cooked.
Swept.
Washed clothes.
Mended torn work gloves.
Our marriage existed inside one shared notebook.
Storm coming.
Flour is in the upper drawer.
Do not walk beyond the east ravine alone.
Nothing personal.
No questions about what I wanted.
No explanation for why he agreed to marry a woman whose family treated her as collateral.
But he never entered the bedroom without knocking.
He never touched me without permission.
He slept each night on a blanket near the fireplace, though the floor was cold enough to make his joints stiff in the morning.
On the fifth day, I found a new pair of winter boots beside my chair.
They were wider than the boots sold in town and lined with soft wool.
I looked at Elias.
“Did you buy these for me?”
He nodded once.
“Why?”
He wrote:
Your old boots hurt you.
I stared at the sentence.
No one in my family had noticed.
On the eighth night, I woke to a strangled sound from the main room.
Elias lay on the floor beside the fireplace, one hand pressed against the right side of his head. Sweat covered his face despite the cold. His entire body was rigid with pain.
I dropped beside him.
“What’s wrong?”
He could not hear me.
His shaking fingers reached for the notebook.
Happens often.
I did not believe him.
No man who merely suffered an ordinary headache ended up curled on a dirt floor, fighting not to scream.
I brought a damp cloth and supported his head until the spasm eased.
Before sleep took him, he wrote:
Thank you.
After that, I began watching him more carefully.
His hand drifted toward his right ear whenever he believed I was not looking.
Some mornings, faint blood stained his pillow.
He occasionally lost his balance when standing too quickly.
And sometimes, in the middle of a task, his face tightened as though something inside his skull had suddenly moved.
I asked how long it had been happening.
He wrote:
Since I was a child.
“What did the doctors say?”
Connected to deafness. Nothing can be done.
“Did you believe them?”
Elias held my gaze for a long moment.
Then wrote:
No.
That answer stayed with me.
So did the scars behind his ear.
Small, round marks arranged in a line.
Not surgical scars.
Burn marks.
May you like
When I asked about them, Elias shut the notebook.
For the first time since our wedding, fear—not anger—entered his face.
