What We Build Together

The wardrobe was supposed to be an easy win.

“Low stakes,” Mark said, steering the cart through IKEA with the focused optimism of someone who believed problems came in boxes. “We’ll be done by dinner.”

Elena followed a half step behind, maneuvering around a couple arguing in whispers and a child licking a display mirror. The warehouse smelled like sawdust and ambition. Everyone moved with the same hopeful urgency, as if flat-pack furniture were a character test they intended to pass.

Low stakes sounded appealing. Low stakes suggested a day that would not spiral. Elena imagined the wardrobe already assembled, its doors closing with a quiet click, the subtle triumph of improvement without discussion. A task completed. Evidence, however flimsy, that things could still be finished cleanly.

They passed lamps named after winds, rugs named after towns neither of them would ever visit, entire rooms staged to imply that happiness was modular. Somewhere nearby, a couple laughed too loudly at nothing.

At checkout, Mark tapped the long cardboard box twice, as if sealing an agreement with the universe. “See? Simple.”

Elena smiled because that was what the moment asked for. She did not say that simple was rarely neutral. She had learned, over seven years, that nothing revealed a marriage faster than a task both people believed they already knew how to do.

By the time they got home, the sky had flattened into a dull, unpromising gray. The boxes stood stacked by the door, sleek and unassuming, like evidence that had not yet been examined.

The instructions were folded inside the top box, pristine, wordless, and confident. A smiling stick figure pointed toward a finished wardrobe, its posture radiating the kind of certainty neither of them trusted.

Mark rolled up his sleeves. “Let’s just get it done.”

Elena nodded and stepped aside, already feeling—without naming it—the shift from together to adjacent.

The apartment was quiet in the particular way winter apartments get. Sound didn’t travel far. Even mistakes seemed muffled. Mark laid the pieces out on the floor with care, sorting by size, aligning screws into neat rows. He believed organization prevented conflict. This belief had survived graduate school, job changes, and one regrettable attempt at sourdough.

Elena watched from the doorway, coffee warming her hands. She admired this about him, usually: the way he trusted systems. She also knew how brittle that trust could be.

“Are you sure that’s everything?” she asked.

Mark checked the list. “It’s everything.”

By noon, the frame stood upright—incorrectly.

They noticed at the same time, which somehow made it worse.

Mark frowned. “That’s not right.”

Elena tilted her head. “That’s what I said earlier.”

“You said it might be off.”

“It’s upside down.”

He stared at the piece, jaw tightening. “The holes—”

“—are facing the wall.”

Silence pressed in, sharp and precise.

Mark exhaled. “Okay.”

He dismantled the frame with controlled efficiency, the sound of wood knocking against wood louder than necessary. Elena hovered, unsure whether offering help would read as cooperation or critique. She had learned the difference mattered.

They had done this before. Not this wardrobe, but this rhythm. The bookshelf assembled crooked and left that way for years because neither wanted to reopen the argument it represented. The bed frame bought during the brief, hopeful period when they believed square footage might fix what language hadn’t.

They ordered takeout and ate standing up, careful not to drip sauce on the instructions, as if those deserved respect.

“You don’t have to hover,” Mark said, eyes still on the frame.

“I’m not hovering.”

“You’re hovering.”

“I’m trying to help.”

“I don’t need help,” he said, then stopped. “I just need—never mind.”

That was new. The stopping.

“It’s always never mind,” Elena said, and heard how old it sounded.

He turned then. “We’re building furniture. This doesn’t have to turn into—”

“Into what?”

“Into everything.”

There it was. The outline of it. The familiar escalation curve.

“You don’t get to decide what things mean to me,” she said.

Mark laughed once, short and humorless. “I’m trying to finish the job.”

“By yourself.”

“That’s not—”

“You always take over,” she said. “And then when it goes wrong—”

“When it goes wrong?” His voice rose despite himself. “I’m the one fixing it.”

“That’s not fixing it. That’s controlling it.”

The word landed harder than she meant. She watched it settle.

Mark looked away. “Timeout.”

Elena turned to the window. The sky still hadn’t committed to snow. She pressed her forehead to the glass and waited for her thoughts to stop racing.

They worked in silence after that—not the easy kind, but the careful one, where every action feels provisional. Each screw tightened like a question: Will this hold?

As the day drained into evening, exhaustion dulled their edges. Elena thought about the early years, when assembling furniture had felt like rehearsal for a life still forming. When Mark’s certainty had felt like shelter. When her hesitation had been read as something he could carry for both of them.

She knew better now. She also knew how much effort it took to unlearn comfort.

Around midnight, Mark handed her the screwdriver without comment. She took it. Their fingers brushed. Neither moved away.

“Try that side,” he said, quieter.

She nodded.

The wardrobe began, slowly, to resemble itself. Doors aligned. Shelves held. It was imperfect—slightly crooked, faintly unsteady—but it stood.

They tightened the final screw at 2:47 a.m.

One was left over.

Elena stared at it, then laughed, surprised by the sound. “Of course.”

Mark picked it up. “Extra,” he said. “Just in case.”

She leaned her forehead against his shoulder. He stayed still, then shifted enough to make it easier.

Outside the window, snow had finally started falling—thick, quiet, indifferent. The streetlight caught it, turned it theatrical. The city softened.

They stood there together, tools abandoned, wardrobe looming behind them like a witness.

No one said who had been right. No one apologized out loud. It wasn’t that those things didn’t matter. They did. They just weren’t required now.

What mattered was the way Mark’s arm rested against Elena’s back. The way she didn’t step away.

…standing shoulder to shoulder, leaning into the same tired silence.

Snow keeps falling, and neither of them feels like moving.

They let it be enough. Peace, at last.