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The silence in the living room had become a physical presence, a weight that settled in the space between the sofa and his armchair. For two days, Ethan and Nora had orbited each other, their conversations limited to household logistics, their touches brief and tentative. The incident at the garden shed was an unacknowledged ghost haunting their quiet home.

Finally, Ethan couldn't stand it any longer. He set his book down. "Nora."

She looked up from her tablet, her hazel eyes wide and uncertain.

"What happened with Gus the other day?" he asked, his voice lower than he intended. "I don't understand it."

He watched her shoulders slump, a visible deflation. She looked small, curled on the sofa. "I know," she whispered. "It was stupid."

"It was more than stupid. You leaned on him. The way you spoke to him..." The images were still burned into his mind: her body pressed against Gus's, her breathy, foreign-sounding voice.

Nora's eyes began to well up. He hadn't expected tears. "I saw the way he was talking to you, Ethan. The way he calls you 'Professor,' like you're some helpless bookworm who can't even handle a garden. It just... it made me so angry."

Ethan stared at her, caught off guard. He hadn't considered that.

"I was just so irritated with him being a condescending ass to you," she continued, her voice gaining a bit of frustrated strength. "I wanted to... I don't know, knock him off balance? It was a stupid, impulsive thing to do."

The explanation landed with a surprising amount of force. It was rash, it was ill-conceived, but it was rooted in something he understood: loyalty. Protective anger. It reframed the entire bizarre event.

"But you let him touch you..." The words were out before he could stop them, the memory of Gus's grimy hand on her hip still a sharp point in his gut.

"I didn't know how to stop it once it started," she said, a single tear tracing a path down her cheek. "I felt so gross afterwards. Can we just... move past it? Please?"

He was across the room in an instant, kneeling by the sofa and pulling her into his arms. He felt a surge of love so fierce it almost hurt. She had done a foolish, strange thing, but she had done it for him. He was the one who should be sorry, for being so passive in the face of Gus's bullying that his wife felt she had to intervene.

"Okay," he whispered into her hair, breathing in her familiar, comforting scent. "Okay. We'll forget it." He held her tight, the unsettling arousal he'd felt now buried under a wave of guilt and fierce, protective love.

A few days later, Ethan felt the familiar rhythm of their life settling back into place. The tension had dissipated, replaced by a quiet, reassuring affection. He was just wrapping up his last seminar of the day, a dense lecture on late Roman provincial administration, when his phone buzzed on the lectern.

He glanced down. A message from Nora.

"Thinking I might swing by the garden later to see you! Bring you a coffee. ❤️"

A slow smile spread across Ethan's face. The garden. It felt like a deliberate olive branch, an effort to reclaim their shared space from the unpleasant memory of Gus. The thought of seeing her there, of them sharing a quiet moment among his ordered rows of plants, filled him with a profound sense of rightness. This was them. This was normal.

He texted back a quick, Can't wait.

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