Afterward, Rowan lifted his glass and looked at me with quiet certainty. “To new beginnings,” he said. “To us.”
We had decided to hold our reception a little later, partly because I had been nervous about the first dance situation, and partly because I did not want Rowan to exhaust himself on the wedding day itself. For the first week of marriage, life was warm and unhurried. Slightly burnt pancakes in the morning. Movies on the couch at night. The comfortable, ordinary rhythm of two people building a shared life.
And then something shifted.
When the Door Stayed Locked
About a week after the wedding, Rowan started waking before me.
He would close the office door quietly behind him before I was fully awake. At dinner he seemed distracted, his jokes a little flat, his attention somewhere else. He barely touched his guitar in the evenings, which was unusual enough to worry me.
I told myself he needed space, that adjusting to married life takes time, that I should not read too much into a few quiet days.
But one night when I reached for his hand in bed, he pulled back.
“Sorry,” he said. “I am just really tired.”
He was not just tired. I knew him well enough to know the difference.
Then he started locking the bedroom door in the afternoons.
Once, when I knocked to ask a simple question about lunch, he responded with an edge in his voice I had never heard before. “I am fine, Mikayla. Please. Not now.”
Rowan had never spoken to me that way. He had never locked doors between us.
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