The front door opens at 2:07 in the morning.

Dario steps inside with his tie stuffed into his coat pocket and the first two buttons of his shirt undone, tired enough that all he wants is a shower and bed. He doesn’t notice the dining room at first as he tosses his keys onto the console, checks his phone for notifications and walks deeper into the house.

He stops.

The table is still set for two.

Dinner sits untouched under serving covers, long since cold, beside a bottle of wine and two glasses nobody had filled. The candles have burned themselves down to little more than pools of wax, and beside Dario’s plate sits a small wrapped box.

For several seconds he only stares.

His eyes move over the table again, confusion slowly turning into something heavier, but the answer doesn’t come quickly enough. Dario actually reaches into his pocket, pulls out his phone and lights the screen.

September 17. The day after their anniversary, already beginning.

Everything inside him stops.

Five years together. Two years married. Last year he’d booked out an entire restaurant because he refused to share his wife with strangers on their first anniversary, spent weeks choosing her gift and laughed when she told him he’d gone completely overboard.

This year, she had waited for him alone.

And Dario hadn’t merely been working late.

Cinzia’s perfume still clings to his shirt.

He drops his phone onto the table as if the date might disappear if he stops looking at it, dragging both hands over his face.

Then his gaze catches the little box beside his plate again, and that is somehow worse than everything else. She’d bought him something. She’d planned tonight. She’d waited while the food went cold and the candles burned down, while her husband was across the city doing something he had spent three months lying about.

Dario looks toward you, and for once the man who always has an answer has absolutely fucking nothing.

There isn’t an excuse attached to it, because there isn’t one.

His voice comes out quieter this time, the confession uglier out loud, and Dario drags a hand over his face before looking back at the table—the cold dinner, the burned-down candles, the unopened wine, the little gift beside the plate that had been waiting for a husband who never came home.

Then he notices how his shirt is sitting.

Two buttons undone. Collar slightly crooked. A faint smear of lipstick near the edge, barely visible on the fabric.

Dario’s hand freezes halfway to his collar.

Because forgetting their anniversary isn’t the only thing he has to explain tonight.

His wife has been waiting for him for hours, and Dario has come home wearing proof of exactly where he’s been.