Chapter Text
Often, maybe every two or so months, Ada gets a message from Leon: “My shirt won’t fit.”
She sends back a: ‘?’
Then Leon sends a photo of his white dress shirt for work, ripped around the sleeves, accompanied by another speech bubble: ‘It burst at the seams.’
He follows it with a: ‘Sorry.’
And Ada—in Lima, in Vienna, in Praia—wherever she is in the world at the moment, would say every time, almost in conclusion: ‘Your biceps got bigger again, is that right?’
Leon replies: ‘No idea.’
But of course, they did. Ada knows her husband’s size. All her gifts for him were excruciatingly tailored and never ill-fitting. Specifically the dress shirts he wears in his office.
‘Are you sure you’re not mutating? I better not see an eye growing out of your arm when I see you.’
‘I don’t think so. Look.’
Leon sends more photos of himself wearing the dress shirts that all burst at the seams around his upper arms—some close-ups and some show him in front of a full-length mirror displaying the extent of the damage. He wore all of them, and sent her all of them, and there are very many, in all manners of blues, mostly navy blues, but there are occasional whites and purples.
Ada flips through each of her husband’s ruined shirt photos forlornly while sipping wine. “Each one is a tragedy—it’s such a waste.”
She spends some more time looking.