In his hands was a small monitor and a folded set of blueprints. Not what my racing mind had spent three nights inventing. My side of the bed, the left, closest to the door, sat directly above a support beam in the basement, and Marcus had discovered a crack in the foundation there two weeks earlier while chasing a draft. He had called an engineer quietly, terrified, and the assessment was worse than he expected. The corner of the house on my side had shifted, and the bedroom floor above it was flagged as the least sound part of the structure. He switched us because he did not want me sleeping over the weakest point until it was fixed, and he could not tell me because I have an anxiety history he has spent nineteen years learning to protect, and he decided, wrongly, that he would rather look strange than frighten me.

The nights downstairs and the three a.m. trip outside were him checking the beam and the exterior cracks by flashlight when he could not sleep from worrying. The monitor was a moisture and movement sensor he had installed on the foundation, which pinged his phone every time it registered a shift, which is why he woke whenever I moved, because he had trained himself to jolt at that sound. He had been lying awake for two weeks listening to a house he was afraid was failing under the woman he loved.