The friend plan was Derek's idea. He'd been meaning to organise a dinner with his university friends, the ones he'd been close to for years but hadn't seen properly since he'd moved in with Shirly. It wasn't that he'd forgotten them. It was that life had got busy, and 'busy' is the polite word for 'I chose my sofa over my friendships and I'm not sure how to undo it.'
Shirly said she'd come. She always said she'd come. But there was a particular kind of silence she fell into on the drive to these things, a silence that meant she was preparing herself to be the partner who doesn't quite fit in, the one who laughs at jokes she doesn't understand, the one who spends the evening nodding and smiling and wishing she'd stayed home.
Derek knew this about her. He knew it and he still invited her, because not inviting her felt worse. But he also knew that she sometimes wished he'd just go alone, that she could have an evening to herself, with her own friends, her own sofa, her own silence. And he felt guilty for wanting to go without her, because going without her felt like a vote of no confidence in their social life.
The birthday party was Shirly's cousin's. Derek didn't want to go. He said he had work. He didn't have work. He just found family parties exhausting, the aunt who asked when they were getting married, the uncle who commented on how much Shirly had eaten, the cousin who thought 'political debate' was a valid form of after-dinner entertainment. Shirly understood this. She understood it and she still wanted him there, because showing up for her family was how she showed him that he was part of her life, not just her evenings.
The holiday decision was the big one. Shirly wanted a beach. Derek wanted a city. She wanted to do nothing. He wanted to do everything. She wanted sunshine and silence and a book. He wanted museums and restaurants and walking tours. They compromised: a city with a beach. It satisfied neither of them. But they had a photograph on the mantelpiece of them eating gelato on a promenade, looking happy, and that photograph became the story of the trip, not the arguments about directions, not the museum Derek loved and Shirly hated, not the beach Shirly loved and Derek found boring. Just the gelato, and the way they laughed when it dripped on his shoe.