Beneath the Same Sky

The ceiling fan clicked on every third rotation. I'd counted the clicks for the past hour, the way the blade wobbled just slightly off its axis, and how the sound was always a half-second behind the shadow it cast across the wall. Huzaifah used to say I noticed things nobody else did. He meant it as a compliment then.

Now the other side of the bed was cold and flat, the sheets still tucked the way I'd made them that morning, because he hadn't come to bed at all.

I rolled onto my back and pressed my palm against the empty space. Cotton, cool. No dent, no warmth. The pillow still held the shape from when I'd fluffed it at noon, hopeful and stupid. I checked the clock on my phone. 2:47. The blue light stung my eyes and I put the phone face down on my chest.

From the living room, the low murmur of the television. Some cricket match from Australia, the crowd noise rising and falling in waves. He'd been out there since eleven, after the dishes, after I'd said goodnight and he'd said goodnight back without looking up from his phone.

I sat up. The fan clicked. Clicked. Clicked.

Our room smelled like the jasmine sachet I'd tucked into the wardrobe last week, too sweet, cloying, and underneath it the faint sourness of sweat from his kurta hanging on the hook behind the door. I could smell him in the fabric even from here. That mix of him and the cheap soap he refuses to change, the one his mother used to buy in bulk from the Sunday bazaar.

I got out of bed.

The floor tiles were cool against my bare feet. I walked to the door and stood there with my hand on the frame, listening. The commentator's voice, British and excited about a boundary. Then Huzaifah's voice, low, talking to someone. Not on the phone. In the room.

I opened the door.

He was on the sofa with his back to me, laptop open on the coffee table, headphones in. Not watching cricket at all. The television was just noise, a curtain he'd drawn around himself. His shoulders were hunched forward, the way they got when he was deep in something, and his right hand was moving on the trackpad, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.

"Huzaifah."

He didn't turn. The headphones.

I walked around the sofa and stood between him and the screen. He looked up, startled, and pulled one earbud out.

"Yaar, you scared me."

"It's almost three."

"I know. I know. Just finishing something."

I looked at the laptop. A spreadsheet. Columns of numbers, some highlighted in yellow, some in red. Nothing I recognized. He closed the lid before I could read the headers.

"What is that?"

"Work."

"At three in the morning?"

He rubbed his face with both hands, and I saw how tired he was, the skin under his eyes gone dark and loose. He hadn't shaved in three days. The stubble made him look older than thirty-eight, which is what he is, what I am, both of us born in the same September, three days apart, which his mother never let me forget, as if it meant something.

"I couldn't sleep," he said. "Didn't want to wake you."

"You wouldn't have woken me. I was awake."

"Then why are you standing there looking at me like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like I've done something."

I didn't answer. Because he had. Not something big, not one thing I could point to and say, this, this is the problem. But a hundred small things, the accumulation of weeks, the way he'd stopped reaching for me in the night, the way his phone had become a wall between us, the way he said "later" to everything, dinner, conversation, my hand on his arm.

I sat down on the other end of the sofa. Not close. The distance felt deliberate, and I hated myself for making it.

"Come to bed," I said.

"I will. In a bit."

"You always say that."

"I always come."

"No. You don't."

He looked at me then, really looked, for the first time in days. His eyes are the color of strong chai, dark and warm when he lets them be, and right now they were tired and guarded and something else I couldn't name. Guilt, maybe. Or fear. I've never been good at reading him when he doesn't want to be read.

"Sundas."

"Don't say my name like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you're about to explain something I won't understand."

He laughed, but it wasn't a real laugh, just air pushed out through his nose. "You understand everything. That's the problem."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

He shook his head and reached for his headphones again, and I caught his wrist. My fingers wrapped around the bone, the thin skin, the pulse beating there faster than it should. He went still.

"Let go," he said. Quiet.

"Tell me what's going on."

"Nothing's going on."

"Huzaifah."

"It's work. It's just work. There's a situation, a problem with the accounts, and I'm trying to fix it before it becomes a bigger problem. That's all."

"What kind of problem?"

"Money problem."

"We have money."

"We have some money. Not enough money."

I let go of his wrist. He pulled his arm back and rubbed the place where I'd held him, not because I'd hurt him, I hadn't, but because he wanted me to see him doing it. A small accusation.

"How much?" I asked.

"Don't worry about it."

"How much, Huzaifah?"

He was quiet for a long moment. The television crowd roared, a wicket, the commentator shouting, and Huzaifah reached for the remote and turned it off. The silence that followed was heavy, the fan clicking from the bedroom, the refrigerator humming in the kitchen, the tick of the wall clock that I'd bought at the Sunday market because it was shaped like a sunflower and I'd thought it was cheerful.

"Enough that I need to figure it out myself," he said finally. "I don't want you involved."

"I'm your wife. I'm already involved."

"You're my wife," he repeated, and something in his voice made my stomach drop. Not anger. Not tenderness. Resignation. Like he was stating a fact he'd been trying to forget.

I stood up. I couldn't sit there anymore, not with him looking at me like that, not with the laptop closed between us and whatever was inside it.

"Come to bed," I said again. "Please."

He didn't move.

"Huzaifah. Come to bed."

"I can't."

"Why not?"

"Because I can't sleep. Because when I lie down next to you I just stare at the ceiling and think about all of it, and you're right there, breathing, and I can't, Sundas. I can't."

I stood in the doorway between the living room and the hallway, and I felt the cold of the tiles climb up through my feet, my ankles, my calves. The house was so quiet now. Just the fan. Just the clock. Just the two of us not saying the things we should have been saying for months.

"Then I'll stay here," I said.

"You should sleep."

"I'll stay here."

I sat down on the floor, my back against the wall, facing him. He watched me, and I watched him, and neither of us said anything for a long time. The clock ticked. The fan clicked. Somewhere outside, a dog barked once and then stopped.

He opened the laptop again. The screen lit his face blue and strange, and he started scrolling, and I sat on the cold floor and watched him work on whatever it was that had taken him away from me, and I thought about the first night we spent together, in his cousin's flat in Lahore, the mattress on the floor, the window open to the street noise, how he'd held me so tight I couldn't tell where I ended and he began.

That was eight years ago.

Now I was sitting on the floor at three in the morning, and my husband was on the sofa with a laptop full of numbers, and the space between us was the size of a whole life.

I didn't get up. I didn't go back to bed. I stayed there, on the floor, and I made a decision. Not the one I wanted to make. The one I had to.

I would find out what was on that laptop.