Hair. My hair.

Every bundle held a clean handful of it, wound and knotted, wrapped and tied. Ximena thought it was something occult. She is from a town where that is a real fear, and she had been carrying it for months, frightened for a woman she had never met.

It was not occult. It was the shower drain.

I have alopecia areata. Diagnosed in February, in the middle of a year I told everyone was just work stress. Desmond went to every appointment. What I never told him, because I could not, was that finding it in the drain each morning was the part that broke me. He watched me cry over a plughole in March and he never mentioned it again.

Then he started getting up at half five. Clearing the drain, the pillow, the sofa, the hairbrush. Wrapping it so the bag would not show anything through the plastic. Taking it to his office bin. And when he realized he could not keep the house clean enough on his own, he hired a woman to take the bags away before I came home, and told her never to speak to me, because explaining it would have meant explaining what she was carrying.

He did all of it for eleven months without saying one word about it to anyone.

I confronted him that night with the bundles on the table, ready to accuse him of something I could not even name. He went very quiet, and then he said, “I didn’t want you to have to look at it.” That was all. That is still all he has ever said about it.

We have talked properly since. He is not a saint, and he was wrong, and I told him so. Hiding my own illness from me in a bin was not protection, it was him managing his own helplessness. He cried when I said it. So did I.

Ximena still comes on Wednesdays. I met her properly, and I thanked her, and she cried too, mostly from relief.

I shaved my head in June. It was Desmond’s idea and I hated it for about four days.

There is no red cloth in the house anymore. I sometimes think about a man getting up in the dark, kneeling over a drain, tying black thread around the thing he could not bear his wife to see.