She was wearing my old, stained college t-shirt and sweatpants with holes in the knees. She didn’t look like a woman preparing for a lover; she looked like a soldier preparing for war. She tied her hair back and vanished into the hallway.
I switched to the kitchen camera. She was dragging the heavy oak dining table across the floor by herself. I winced; that table weighed two hundred pounds, and I had promised to fix the wobbling leg six months ago.
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She didn’t stop to rest. For the next three hours, I watched her scrub grout lines with a toothbrush. She climbed ladders to dust ceiling fans I hadn’t looked at in years. It was frantic, obsessive, almost violent cleaning.