I laughed for the first time in months.
But something else was happening.
Without me there, Robert began noticing things he’d never paid attention to.
The kitchen floor didn’t clean itself.
The refrigerator didn’t fill itself.
The bills weren’t automatically paid.
His clean towels didn’t magically appear in the bathroom.
And meals didn’t arrive on the table simply because he was hungry.
On the twelfth day, he hired a cleaning woman.
She charged him $150 for a thorough cleaning.
When he complained about the price, she calmly explained that it was several hours of physical work.
The following week, he paid for laundry and ironing.
Then he began ordering prepared meals because cooking after work exhausted him.
For the first time, Robert was paying strangers to do the work I’d done without a salary or a single word of thanks.
But the real turning point came on the twentieth day.