Morris slammed his palm against the laminate countertop, the sound echoing like a gunshot in the cramped kitchen. The exhaustion in his eyes had curdled into a cold, sharp clarity.
"I am not getting any fucking younger, Connie!" he roared, his voice trembling with the weight of a decade's worth of suppressed frustration. "I want to have a family. I want to build generational wealth. I want to be comfortable. But look at us! Once you're late on one bill, the others follow in pursuit until it's overwhelming. You make two hundred dollars more than me, Connie. Where does it go?"
Connie flinched, but she didn't back down. She set her designer shopping bags on the floor with a defensive shove. "You think I'm just throwing it away? Morris, look at the world! Everything is triple what it used to be. And you're talking about kids? Kids are a financial black hole. The childcare, the insurance, the food—we can barely keep the lights on in Chicago as it is! I don't want them yet because I don't want to be drowning even more than we already are."
"Yet," Morris repeated, his voice dripping with bitterness. "You always say 'yet' or 'oh, I'm going to do it soon.' You can't give me a damn due date or a year. It's always some vague future that never arrives. Do you not want more in life than just surviving and buying boots?"
"Of course I want more in life!" Connie shouted back, her face flushing a deep red. "But having a family is a massive responsibility. Hell, Morris, we aren't even married! How can you expect me to jump into motherhood when we haven't even taken that step?"
Morris let out a harsh, jagged laugh that held no humor. He stepped closer, his shadow looming over her in the flickering light.
"Yeah. We aren't married because you made me look like a fool for years," he said, his voice dropping to a low, dangerous hiss. "Those times we tried for a baby? I went for checkups for three years straight. I sat in those doctors' offices feeling like less of a man, thinking something was broken inside of me. I took you with me to get checked out, too. The doctors said there was nothing wrong with me, and nothing wrong with you."
He took a step toward the bathroom hallway, pointing a finger toward the linen closet.
"Only to find out the truth. You were taking birth control pills the whole time, Connie. You hid them behind the pads in the back of the closet like I was some kind of enemy you had to outsmart. You let me believe I was sterile while you lied to my face every single night."
The silence that followed was suffocating. Connie opened her mouth to speak, her eyes darting toward the hallway, but the excuses died on her lips. For the first time in twelve years, she saw that the man standing in front of her wasn't just angry—he was finished.
I didn't ask for much from you, dear," Morris whispered, the word dear sounding like a jagged piece of glass in the quiet room. "I asked for the truth. I asked for a partner. I didn't ask for a roommate I had to bankroll while she plotted against the very life we talked about building."
Connie's face shifted from guilt to a sharp, defensive rage. She shoved her chair back, the legs screeching against the linoleum. "You want to talk about truth? The truth is you're obsessed with a fantasy! You wanted a housewife and a picket fence on a Chicago budget, and I wasn't ready to lose my identity to a diaper bag! Yeah, I took the pills. I took them because I was scared, Morris! Scared that if I had a kid with you, I'd be trapped in this shitty apartment forever while you counted every penny I spent on a latte!"
"Trapped?" Morris stepped into her space, his chest heaving. "You've been 'trapped' in a life where I pay the lion's share of the rent so you can carry a handbag that costs more than our electric bill! You aren't scared of being trapped, Connie. You're scared of being responsible. You're scared of someone else's needs coming before your own damn reflection."
"Don't you dare talk to me about responsibility," she spat, poking a manicured finger into his chest. "I work forty-five hours a week! I make more than you! If you wanted a baby so bad, maybe you should have worked harder to provide a life where I didn't feel like I had to hide my choices just to have a say in my own body!"
Morris recoiled as if she'd struck him. The sheer audacity of her flipping the script—blaming his income for her three years of calculated lies—was the final thread snapping.
"You let me go to a urologist, Connie," he said, his voice shaking with a terrifying, quiet fury. "I sat on that table. I gave blood. I prayed. I cried in the car because I thought I couldn't give you the one thing you said you wanted. And all that time, you were watching me suffer, knowing you had a pack of pills tucked away behind the Tampax. That isn't 'fear.' That's cruelty."
"I was protecting myself!" she screamed, her voice cracking.
"No," Morris grabbed his coat off the rack, his movements sudden and violent. "You were protecting your lifestyle. You love your things more than you ever loved me. You love the idea of us, but you hate the reality of effort."
He headed for the door, not even looking back at the shopping bags she'd dropped.
"Where are you going? Morris! We aren't done!"
"Oh, we are done," he said, his hand on the deadbolt. "I'm going to a hotel. Tomorrow, I'm calling the landlord. You can figure out how to pay the gas bill with your new boots. I hope they keep you warm, because I'm through being your safety net."
He slammed the door so hard the framed photo of their college graduation rattled on the wall, then finally slid off the nail and shattered on the floor.