The Month the Numbers Change
You find out on a Tuesday. The offer letter is open on your laptop, and the number is larger than you expected, larger than his, and your first feeling is not pride. It is a quick, specific dread, the kind that arrives before thought does. You close the tab before he walks into the room. Not because you are ashamed of the number. Because you already know, without having to think it through, that the number will require management.You tell him that evening. You say it carefully, the way you would say something that could tip either way. He says congratulations. He means it. He hugs you. And then the two of you sit down to dinner and talk about something else, and that talking-about-something-else is the beginning of the silence that will live in your marriage for the next year.
