“Walls Between Us”
The apartment always looked perfect to outsiders.
Clean white curtains. Polished wooden floors. A small balcony with two chairs that almost never faced each other.
But inside, silence had become its own resident.
Maya stood in the kitchen, stirring tea that had long gone cold. The spoon moved automatically, like her body was there but her thoughts weren’t. From the living room, she could hear the soft tapping of a keyboard.
Arman was home.
But not really.
That was the strange part of their marriage. He was physically present most days, yet emotionally elsewhere. And Maya had stopped asking where.
She poured the tea into two cups anyway.
One for him. One for the hope that things might still be fixed.
Arman didn’t look up when she placed the cup beside his laptop.
“Thanks,” he muttered.
That was it. No eye contact. No smile. Just the glow of the screen reflecting on his face like a second life.
Maya sat across from him on the couch, watching him type. She used to ask about his day. About work. About the little things that made up a shared life.
Now she wasn’t sure where to begin without sounding like a stranger trying to restart a broken conversation.
“Did you eat?” she asked finally.
“Yes,” he replied without pause.
A lie, she thought. The untouched lunch box on the counter told a different story.
But she didn’t correct him.
Correction had become dangerous in their house. Not because of anger — but because of distance. Every small truth exposed another crack they both pretended not to see.
They used to talk for hours when they first moved into the apartment.
Late-night dreams. Future plans. Names for children they weren’t even close to having.
Now the loudest thing between them was the refrigerator humming in the silence.
One evening, Maya received a message on her phone while Arman was in the shower.
It was from a number she didn’t recognize.
“He talks to me more than he talks to you.”
Her heart didn’t race immediately. It froze first.
Then slowly, painfully, it began to beat again.
She stared at the message for a long time. Waiting for confusion to turn into denial. Or anger. Or some emotion she could hold onto.
But all she felt was exhaustion.
Not surprise.
That scared her more.
When Arman came out of the bathroom, she was still sitting there.
Phone in hand.
Silent.
“You’re quiet,” he said, drying his hair.
Maya looked up. “Do you want to tell me something?”
He paused for a second — just a second too long.
“No,” he said.
And that was the moment something inside her finally stopped trying.
Not breaking. Not exploding.
Just… stopping.
Days passed differently after that.
Not better. Not worse. Just hollow.
They still lived in the same apartment. Still shared meals sometimes. Still exchanged polite words like colleagues sharing office space.
But now Maya noticed things she had ignored before.
The way Arman smiled at his phone but not at her.
The way he stayed up late, not working — but messaging.
The way he never denied anything directly anymore.
Silence had turned into confirmation.
One night, she finally asked.
“Are you seeing someone else?”
Arman didn’t react immediately. He closed his laptop slowly. Like he had been expecting this question for a long time.
“I didn’t plan for it to happen,” he said.
Maya laughed softly. Not because it was funny. Because it sounded rehearsed.
“Does anyone ever plan it?”
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He didn’t answer.
That silence again.
The same language they had been speaking for months.
But what Maya didn’t know was that Arman wasn’t the only one hiding something.
She stood up, walked to the bedroom, and opened a drawer.
Inside was a small stack of printed messages. Call logs. Screenshots.
All neatly arranged.
Proof of her own conversations.
Because Maya had also found comfort elsewhere.
Someone who listened when Arman didn’t. Someone who replied faster. Someone who asked how she felt instead of what she needed.
But unlike Arman, she had never admitted it out loud.
Not even to herself.
The apartment wasn’t breaking a marriage.
It was revealing one already broken.
The next morning, they sat across from each other at breakfast.
For the first time in months, Arman spoke first.
“We should talk properly.”
Maya nodded. “We should.”
But neither of them moved.
Because “talking properly” required honesty neither of them was sure they still had the right to use.
That evening, something changed.
Arman left his phone unlocked on the table.
A notification lit up the screen.
Maya didn’t look at it immediately.
Not because she respected privacy.
But because she already knew what she would find.
And she was right.
A name she had never seen.
Words she had never been part of.
A life she had never been included in.
But then something unexpected happened.
Her own phone buzzed.
She picked it up.
It was him.
The man she had been secretly speaking to.
The one who had told her Arman “talked to her more.”
A message.
“He just told me he wants to fix things with his wife.”
Maya stared at it.
Slowly, she looked up.
Arman was already watching her.
Not shocked.
Not angry.
Just tired.
Like he had been waiting for the moment both secrets finally stood in the same room.
And in that silence, the truth finally stopped hiding:
It was never about who cheated first.
It was about how long two people can live in the same space without ever really speaking the same language again.
The apartment hadn’t divided them.
Their silence had.
And worse than betrayal…
Neither of them had noticed when love stopped being spoken.
It only became something they assumed the other still understood.
The last scene wasn’t loud.
No shouting. No tears. No dramatic exit.
Just two cups of untouched tea on the table.
And two people realizing, at the exact same time, that they had both been waiting for someone else to start a conversation that should have begun years ago.
