I gave up my seat on the bus because that had always been the kind of woman I trained myself to be.
Even when I was exhausted, underpaid, overlooked, I still chose politeness.
The old woman clutched my wrist before stepping off at a cracked, half-forgotten bus stop on the east side of Dallas, her fingers dry and cold like brittle paper. She looked straight into my eyes and said, “If your husband gives you a necklace, put it in water before you wear it.”
I almost laughed. The sentence didn’t belong to reality. It sounded like something pulled from a superstition, something half-remembered and strange. But there was something in her eyes—sharp, urgent, knowing—that made my chest tighten and my bones feel hollow.
By the time I got back to my apartment complex off Maple Avenue, I tried to dismiss it. Just another odd moment in a long day.
I climbed the worn stairs, past chipped paint and flickering lights, hearing someone’s TV through thin walls. I told myself I had more important things to worry about. Rent. Work. The quiet distance growing inside my marriage.
From the outside, my marriage to Daniel Carter still looked intact. Eight years together. No kids. Shared bills.
Shared routines that had gone stale long ago. But the distance hadn’t come all at once. It crept in slowly—late nights, turned phones, hushed conversations in hallways, showers the second he got home, a sudden obsession with cologne from a man who used to buy the cheapest deodorant without thinking.
