Outside, the snow has stopped falling, and the drifts on the ground are slushy and grey with the ash beneath them. You pour yourself a glass of vodka with trembling hands and tip it into the back of your throat. It burns, and you welcome the feeling, because maybe then you won't have to think, to feel - anything but the empty numbness of disappointment.
"You're still angry with me." It is not a question. You stare into the alcohol, pour yourself some more, catching a glimpse of accusing eyes in the corner of your vision.
On the mantelpiece in the living room is a pile of treasured objects. A worn silver crucifix, a tattered scarf, a violin with red, swirled wood. Fuzzy nostalgia embodied, something you can pick up, smell, play, when the guilt gets too much for you and the house is unbearably quiet and anger hangs heavy in the air like the ash outside. You were both condemned to hollow faces and thinning hair and wracking coughs but only one of you deserves them, and only one has the right to be angry, to let adoration become fear and palpable loathing and to lay cold, icy hands on yours as you curl up in bed at night. He never speaks. Only regards you with hard, tortured eyes, slides inhumanly frozen skin across your own, and you shrink back, weeping...
(But all of that is at night, and in the weak daylight he leaves you alone, mostly. You aren't sure which you prefer, because at least at night you apologize and he seems to hear you; he acknowledges your guilt, instead of sitting at the table watching you with complete disinterest, clinical detachment, as you pour poison into your now-mortal body and babble like an abandoned child.)
"I'm sorry," you say now, as you have said every day for four hundred and twenty-three days, and your voice catches in your throat. "I didn't- I didn't mean it. You know I didn't mean it, right? I would do anything to go back, to change it... can't you forgive me? Or at least try to talk to me about it? We can- we can work things out, I know we can, I'm so sorry..."
You spin the glass in your fingers, glance over at the table. When there is no answer, you bite your lip and take another drink. Crazy people hear whispers around corners, and he's said nothing to you since he moved in with you, so surely-? He's just ignoring you, that's all. He's giving you the silent treatment, like childhood friends fighting over an empty plate. Heaven knows you deserve it, but still...
"I wish you'd say something," you say plaintively. But the silence stretches on, and for the first time doubt starts to extend its tentative tendrils softly into the base of your mind.