They carried box after box down the driveway while the July heat pressed against the concrete and the neighborhood pretended not to watch. Margaret kept issuing orders no one listened to. Lily sneered at everything she had to lift. Rebecca went silent. Ethan sweated through the back of his shirt by the third load and looked steadily less like a newly married man and more like someone dragging the corpse of his own decisions uphill.
I stood inside the garage door with the opener in one hand and watched.
Let them carry it, I thought. Every lie. Every consequence. Every stupid glittering fantasy they built by hollowing out my life from the inside.
I did not have to anymore.
When the truck finally drove off and the street fell still again, the house did something unexpected.
It exhaled.
I felt it as tangibly as a temperature change. The rooms were the same. The furniture was the same. The same afternoon light fell across the dining room table, the same chime sounded when the fridge door didn’t seal completely, the same clock ticked in the upstairs hallway. But something oppressive had lifted, some invisible weight I had been carrying so long I no longer knew the shape of myself without it.