Three winters ago his five a.m. shifts and her sleepless nights had made the spare room the practical choice, just for the season, and the season had simply never been called off. Twelve years married, and for three of them the goodnight had happened on the landing between two doors instead of behind one.
The third board from the top complained under any weight at all, a flat dry note the whole dark house seemed to lean in and listen for, and in three years neither of them had once let it sound. He skipped it going left. She skipped it going right. It had become its own small fluency, the two of them fluent in not waking each other.
Tonight she stood at the top of the stairs in his old T-shirt, the one that still said a laundromat that had closed years ago, and did not skip it.
The creak went up through the house like something finally said aloud. She stayed exactly where she'd landed, one hand on the newel post, listening to what she'd just done instead of taking it back.
Under his door the thread of light took a second too long to answer — long enough that she'd nearly decided she'd misjudged the whole thing badly — and then his lamp clicked on.
No footsteps yet. Just the light, and the small domestic sound of a book being set face-down on the nightstand, the sound of someone deciding something.
"You're up," he said, through the door, pitched for a hallway and not a bedroom.
"I stepped on the board," she said. "On purpose." She let the silence that followed sit there uncorrected, hers to keep or take back for exactly as long as he needed to decide which.
The door opened the width of a hand, then wider. He stood in the lamp's thin gold light in nothing meant for an audience, looking at her the way he used to before the spare room had a name, before three winters had quietly become the whole shape of their marriage.
Neither of them said goodnight. She crossed the three feet of landing that had taken three years to cross, and the board, when his bare foot came down on it to meet her, finally said something neither of them minded the house hearing twice.