His Brother’s Wife
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 7
He smelled the coffee before he reached the kitchen.
It stopped him in the hallway. In the three years he had lived in this apartment he had made his own coffee every morning — black, two cups, standing at the counter with his phone — and the smell coming from the kitchen now was different from that. Fuller. There were other smells underneath it, eggs and toast and something warm he couldn’t immediately identify.
He came around the corner and stopped.
Rebekah was at the stove in a housecoat, her dark hair loose down her back, turning eggs in a pan with the focused attention she gave to most things. The table was set — actually set, with a place mat and juice and a folded napkin — and there was toast in the rack and a small bowl of cut fruit he was almost certain hadn’t been in the refrigerator last night.
She heard him and looked over her shoulder.
“Good morning. Sit down, it’s almost ready.”
“Rebekah —” He looked at the table. “I don’t eat breakfast.”
She turned back to the eggs. “You do now.”
He sat down. It seemed like the thing to do.
She set a plate in front of him — two eggs over easy, wheat toast, the fruit — and poured his coffee without asking how he took it, which meant she had been paying attention to something he didn’t remember demonstrating, and sat across from him with her own cup and watched him eat with the quiet satisfaction of someone doing exactly what they were made to do.
It was the best breakfast he’d had in years. He ate it in four minutes because he was running late, thanked her, rinsed his plate at the sink out of habit, and was out the door at seven fifty-two.
She cleared the table and washed the pan and wiped down the stove, and when the kitchen was clean she stood at the window with her coffee and watched the street below and did not think about the fact that she had been up since six.
This was how married life began.
Within a week the apartment had been transformed in the quiet methodical way that Rebekah transformed things — not dramatically, just thoroughly. The bathroom grout was white again. The kitchen shelves had been reorganized so that everything was findable. His dress shirts came back from the laundry folded in a way they had never been folded before, and his suits were hung with the pockets emptied and the jackets brushed. She did all of it without comment and without expectation, the way she had been taught that a home was maintained, and Joshua moved through the results of her work every day without quite seeing it, the way you stop seeing wallpaper.
He slipped back into his old rhythms inside of two weeks.
Tuesday and Thursday after work he went to the bar on Fifth Avenue where his colleagues gathered after six — a standing arrangement that had been standing since before Zack died, before any of this, when his life had looked like what he had planned. He told himself it was professional, and it was, partly. He told himself Rebekah had the apartment, had everything she needed, was fine. He texted when he was running late at first. Then he stopped texting.
She waited up the first two times. She was on the couch with a book when he came in at ten-thirty, and she looked up and said nothing about the hour, just asked if he was hungry, and he said no and said good night and went to bed. After the third time she stopped waiting up. He noticed the light under her door was already off when he got home, and told himself that was better, that she was settling in, that it meant she was comfortable.
He did not ask himself what it actually meant.
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