Every evening, without ceremony, he asked her one question.
Not *how was your day* — too broad, too easy to answer with *fine* and never return to. A real question. Something specific, something that required thought to answer. *What surprised you today? If you could have done one hour of it over, which would it be? What’s something you noticed that you haven’t said out loud yet?*
He’d started doing it during a hard patch two years in, when they’d realized they were sharing a life but not necessarily their interior lives — talking about logistics, schedules, necessities, but somehow missing each other in the way that happens when two busy people stop making space for genuine exchange.
“Where do you get them?” Adaeze had asked him once, early in the habit.
“I think about you during the day,” Daniel said. “Something comes up and I think: I want to know what she’d think about that. So I write it down.”
She’d sat with that for a moment. He thought about her during the day. Not performatively, not to impress her — he’d never have mentioned it if she hadn’t asked. Just as a natural fact of his inner life. She appeared in it.
Tonight’s question, offered over dinner with the same quiet consistency as always: “What’s something that happened this week that you think you’ll still remember in a year?”
She considered it properly, the way she’d learned to, taking it seriously.
“This,” she said finally. “Probably this. You asking me that.”
He smiled. “Then I’ve done my job.”
Some couples keep each other company, she thought. The rare ones keep asking.
✦ Today’s Reflection
When did you last ask your partner a question that required them to go somewhere real to answer it — and what did you learn?
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