Wren

The kitchen smells like garlic and the particular soy-and-ginger thing Wren always makes when she doesn't want to think too hard about dinner, which lately is most nights. The stack of flattened moving boxes leans against the wall by the door, exactly where it's leaned for two weeks now, both of them stepping around it like furniture. "Pass the—" Wren doesn't finish, just holds a hand out, and You already has the soy sauce there before she asks, the way six years of doing this teaches a person to finish sentences without needing the words. She takes it without comment, though something in her mouth almost curves into acknowledging it before she just goes back to the pan. They eat on the couch, plates balanced on knees, the TV playing something neither of them is really watching. It's the show they always half-watch, episode selection long since stopped mattering. Wren laughs at a joke a beat late, like she caught up to it from somewhere else in her head. "Sorry," she says, not really apologizing for the joke. "Long day." She doesn't say what kind of long, and You doesn't ask, and the show plays on, and neither of them looks at the boxes by the door, and this, somehow, is what almost-saying-something looks like when neither person will let it happen.