The thing that started it all was the taste. That's what I should have noticed first—not the bottles under the sink, not the way Mike looked at me when he thought I wasn't looking, not the prescription labels that didn't match anything in our medical history. The thing that should have started my attention was the taste of the water.

It was faint. Metallic. Like drinking from a pipe that hadn't been used in a while. But I noticed, because I'm the kind of person who notices things. That's what makes me good at my job at the gas station—watching the pumps, watching the prices, watching the people who pull in at 2 AM with empty tanks and emptier eyes.

"Did you put something in the water?" I asked Mike one morning, over cereal that had gone soggy because I was thinking about the taste and not stirring fast enough.

He looked up from his newspaper—which he read every morning even though he knew I didn't read newspapers, because reading newspapers was what normal husbands did—and he smiled that smile that was supposed to reassure me and didn't.

"What do you mean, babe?"

"The water. It tastes different. Since you started—since you started doing things differently around here."

He folded the newspaper carefully, like he was folding something fragile, and set it on the table. His hands were clean. They were always clean. I make my living touching gas pumps and credit card machines and other people's dirty money, and my hands are rougher than they should be for a woman my age. His hands were always soft, always clean, and I had always thought that was part of what made him a doctor. Now I wasn't sure.

"I'm just trying to help, Karen," he said, and the word help hung in the air between us like something alive. "You've been stressed. You've been... difficult. The doctor at the clinic said—"

"You're the doctor at the clinic."

"I know what I am," he said, and there was something in his voice that made me want to step back, the way you step back from a dog that's growling but doesn't show its teeth. "And I know that you need help. And I'm giving it to you. That's what husbands do."

He went to work. I finished the cereal. I went to the gas station. I pumped gas for people who didn't look at me the way Mike looked at me—like I was something that needed to be managed, like I was a car that needed to be fixed.

That afternoon, a woman pulled in with a half-empty tank and a face that was all angles and irritation. She looked at me the way people look at gas station attendants: not unkindly, but with the particular species of inattention reserved for people whose jobs involve standing still and saying nothing interesting.

"How much for a tank?" she asked.

"Fifteen," I said.

She paid and said thanks and drove off in a car that was older than both of us and probably held together by rust and hope.

I watched her go, and I thought: I am that car. I am held together by rust and hope, and somewhere, somehow, someone is trying to fix me.

--- **TENSOR ENCODING (OTMES v2):** - Code: OTMES-v2-8C4E80-MM0-A180.0 - M Vector: [7.0, 1.0, 4.0, 2.0, 5.0, 5.0, 4.0, 0.0, 1.0, 2.0] - N Vector: [0.40, 0.60] - K Vector: [0.85, 0.15] - Dominant Mode: MM0 - Direction Angle: 180.0 degrees - Tragedy Rank: T3 殉情级 - E_total (Frobenius Norm): 11.87 - Irreversibility: 1.0