Dark pants. Blue button-down shirt.

Untucked.

That caught my attention.

Jeffrey had always tucked in his shirts.

Even at backyard cookouts.

“Ready?” he asked.

I put my phone into my purse.

“Ready.”

At dinner, we sat near the restaurant windows overlooking the mountains.

Jeffrey barely touched his food.

Neither did I.

Halfway through the meal, I put down my fork.

“Do you still find me attractive?”

His head came up.

The question sat between us.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

He looked around the restaurant.

“Claire, where is this coming from?”

I almost answered.

Then I stopped.

Instead, I looked at him.

“Why did you get another room?”

His hand tightened around his water glass.

“I told you.”

“No. You gave me an excuse.”

He stared at the table.

“I just need some space tonight.”

“From me?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Then look at me and tell me what you did say.”

He could not.

I reached for my purse.

“I’m going upstairs.”

“Claire.”

I stood.

“Enjoy your dinner.”

He caught up with me outside the restaurant.

“Please don’t do this.”

I turned.

“Do what?”

“Decide what I mean before I can explain it.”

“Then explain it.”

He looked toward the lobby.

His face had gone red.

“Not here.”

“Fine.”

I walked toward the elevators.

“My room.”

The Photograph From 1996

Jeffrey followed me upstairs.

When we entered my room, I switched on the lamp beside the bed.

He stayed near the door.

I opened my suitcase and pulled out a small envelope.

I had planned to give it to him after dinner.

Inside was a copy of our honeymoon photograph.

The two of us in front of the downstairs fireplace.

Twenty-four and twenty-five.

I held it out.

“I brought this.”

Jeffrey did not take it.

His eyes dropped to the photograph.

Then something strange happened.

He looked away.

Not from me.

From himself.

I lowered the photograph.

“What is going on?”

“Nothing.”

“Stop saying that.”

He walked toward the window.

For months, I had thought I was the one hiding.

I wore high-necked shirts because I did not want Jeffrey looking at my surgical scar.

I kept the bathroom light low.

The first time I tried on a dress after treatment, I cried because the woman in the mirror looked like someone wearing my clothes.

But now I watched Jeffrey standing beside the window in his untucked shirt.

And I noticed something I should have noticed before.

The shirt was too large.

Not slightly loose.

Large.

His shoulders were rounded beneath it.

His hands stayed near the bottom hem, pulling it forward whenever he turned.

“Jeff?”

“Don’t.”

It was the first time he had said it sharply.

I stopped.

He closed his eyes.

Then he reached beneath his shirt.

I heard fabric stretch.

A few seconds later, he pulled something black from underneath it.

At first, I thought it was an undershirt.

Then he dropped it onto the chair.

It was a compression garment.

I stared at it.

Jeffrey sat down.

His shirt fell against his body differently now.

And suddenly I could see what oversized clothes had been hiding.

My husband had gained a lot of weight.

Not ten pounds.

Not twenty.

Far more.

I thought about the past year.

The late-night takeout containers.

The gym membership card untouched beside his keys.

The mornings when I woke at three and found the other side of the bed empty.

The way he had stopped wearing the gray suit he loved.

The way he stood behind me in photographs instead of beside me.

“How much?” I asked quietly.

Jeffrey kept looking at the floor.

“Fifty-eight pounds.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed.

He gave a short laugh, but there was nothing amused about it.

“Almost sixty.”

I looked at the compression garment on the chair.

Then at the photograph still in my hand.

Jeffrey finally glanced toward it.

“That guy downstairs,” he said, pointing at the twenty-five-year-old version of himself, “I walked into this hotel remembering him.”

He rubbed both hands over his face.

“And then I saw that bed.”

I said nothing.

“I haven’t let you see me without a shirt in months, Claire.”

My fingers tightened around the photograph.

“I thought that was because of me.”

His head lifted.

“Because of you?”

“Because you didn’t want to look at me.”

For several seconds, neither of us moved.

Jeffrey stared at me as though I had said something completely impossible.

Then his eyes went to my short hair.

My loose wedding ring.

The blouse buttoned higher than anything I used to wear.

He looked back at me.

“Claire, I thought you didn’t want to look at me.”

The room became very quiet.

The king-size bed was between us.

The same bed I had spent the afternoon believing he was running away from because of what cancer had done to me.

On the chair beside Jeffrey sat the thing he had been using to hide what the past year had done to him.

I placed our 1996 photograph carefully on the nightstand.

For the first time since we arrived, Jeffrey moved toward the bed instead of away from it.

What We Had Both Been Hiding

Jeffrey sat on the edge of the bed, leaving several feet between us.

For a while, neither of us spoke.

I kept looking at the black compression garment on the chair. It seemed ridiculous that something so ordinary had caused so much damage without my knowing it existed.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

Jeffrey rubbed his palms against his pants.

“When?”

“Anytime in the last year.”

He looked at me. “You were fighting cancer, Claire.”

“That doesn’t mean you stopped existing.”

“It felt like I was supposed to.”

I started to answer, but he shook his head.

“I don’t mean that the way it sounds. You needed me. I wanted you to need me. But every day there was another appointment, another medication, another thing that might go wrong. I kept thinking I could deal with myself later.”

Later had become almost sixty pounds.

When I slept, he stayed awake.

He ate downstairs so the smell would not make me nauseous. Sometimes that meant sandwiches at midnight. Sometimes pizza. “I knew my clothes were getting tight,” he said. “So I bought bigger clothes.”

“And the compression shirt?”

His face reddened.

“Three months ago.”

I thought of all the mornings when he had changed in the bathroom.

“You thought I would care?”

He stared at our honeymoon photograph.

“I thought you might notice.”