Smoked Out of My Marriage

Thomas quit smoking eight years ago because his wife Diana could not tolerate the smell. When he accompanies her to collect her annual physical results, the doctor calls him in alone: Diana has a ground-glass nodule in the upper lobe of her left lung, and prolonged exposure to secondhand smoke is a possible cause. Thomas is shaken, because Diana avoids smoke entirely.

At home, Diana dismisses the six-millimeter nodule and denies that anyone around her smokes. Yet a photo posted by her colleague Curtis Wells shows her sitting close to him on a rooftop while his cigarette burns. Scrolling back through Curtis's feed, Thomas finds months of images in which Diana never flinches from the smoke. He remembers how she once snatched a cigarette from his hand and made him quit.

Now he smokes again in secret, and the question he cannot answer is why Curtis's smoke is tolerable when his own never was.