“Sometimes I feel like a ghost in this house,” Julia says, matter-of-fact, and takes a piece from the bottom right of the Jenga tower. She doesn’t even glance at the easy block near the top.

Her husband Mark doesn’t hesitate. He reached for the opposite corner of the foundation. “I’m tired of pretending we’re okay.” 

They’re dismantling the base.

They go on like this, round after round. Calm voices. Unreadable faces. No raised voices. Just truths, quietly spoken, placed carefully on top of a structure built to collapse under the weight of unwashed dishes and unmet expectations.

———

 “You can say one honest thing each time you pull a block,” the therapist had said. “No arguing. No reactions. Just truth—any truth. It's about practicing vulnerability in a low-stakes way.”

She’d handed them a worksheet and a Jenga tower, like a prescription for something far too broken.

Mark had laughed—dry, skeptical.

Julia had rolled her eyes, unwilling to pretend a game could salvage years of silence and misfires. What they needed was a translator, not a toy.

Still, agreeable as ever, they nodded. Promised they’d try.

They brought the Jenga set home, tucked it onto the bookshelf, and quietly hoped to forget it. But Lily found it first—wide-eyed, delighted, as if it were a treasure chest rather than a therapy tool.

And so, Mark and Julia began to play. Not for healing. Not at first.

But for Lily.

———

From the outside, Julia and Mark Martins are the kind of family other people might envy: a neatly kept house in a quiet, upper-middle-class suburb, two good salaries, and a precocious eight-year-old daughter named Lily.

Yet, somewhere between laundry loads and missed work deadlines, an unfamiliar distance between them has emerged. Julia and Mark haven’t really talked in months. They spoke in to-do lists.

Who’s getting Lily?

Who’s picking up the groceries?

Who’s giving up more of themself today?

They don’t fight anymore. Not because they’ve run out of things to argue about, but because they’ve stopped believing arguments lead anywhere.

And because Lily is always listening.


They both grew up in homes full of shouting—parents who weaponized words, ignored the children in the room. Mark and Julia had promised themselves they’d never do the same. And they hadn’t. But the silence they chose instead wasn’t much better. A decade into their marriage, they still haven’t figured out how to express resentment without detonating everything else.


So, eventually, they decided to try therapy. The therapist gave them tools — “active listening,” using “I” statements, a book on attachment styles. Most of it was used once or twice, then forgotten. But one suggestion stuck: Jenga. So tonight, like every Wednesday, after a quiet dinner, the Martins sit down to play their careful, crumbling game of truth.
———

“I hate broccoli,” Lily declares with delight, yanking a block from the top of the tower with both hands. The block feels light and cool in her hand.

Julia goes next.

“I miss painting,” she says softly, sliding a block from the middle. She steals a glance at Mark. No reaction. They’d talked about this before—briefly, unsuccessfully. Hobbies, they’d decided, were luxuries. Parenting left little room for luxuries.


Mark exhales.
“I don’t remember the last time we said ‘I love you’ to each other.”
He pulls a block from the lower left corner, like saying it out loud required the same delicate precision.

Lily doesn’t fully understand her parents’ confessions, but she can feel a shift. The truths are changing—growing heavier, sharper.

“I wish Daddy didn’t work so much,” she says quietly, choosing not the easy block from the top but one low down, near where her parents pulled theirs.

The tower wobbles.

“I wanted to leave after Thanksgiving,” Julia says flatly, removing a block dead center on the bottom level.

The memory flashes: Mark had invited old college friends. His parents had invited themselves. Julia had planned for three. She ended up cooking for ten—with no help. He arrived an hour before dinner, exhausted. She ended up scarping burnt vegetables into the trash until midnight.

——

There was a time when Julia’s life was filled with more than grocery lists and last-minute dinners, more than wiping counters and folding laundry—hers, Lily’s, and Mark’s. A time before her days blurred into a carousel of school drop-offs, polite small talk with other parents, and the steady erosion of anything that felt like her own.

Back in college, she had been a psychology and art major. She used to lose herself in lecture halls, scribbling notes on The Making of Meaning with the same intensity she brought to her art. She’d spend hours building collages inspired by art therapy—cutting out words and fragments from magazines that sparked something in her. Words that reached toward the opposite of what she feared most—lost, stagnant, numb.

Now, the words that fill her days are less lyrical and more practical: “Vaccum.”, “Back to school sale!” “You forgot?” “Again?”

 ——

Mark knows his absence is felt. Even when he’s home, he isn’t really there. His body may move through the rooms, but his mind is still in the operating theater, in the waiting rooms, in the hallways lined with fluorescent light and fraying nerves.

He thinks about the patient whose family he apologized to after a three-hour delay—exhausted, frustrated, justifiably angry. The hospital’s been short-staffed for months. Everyone is stretched thin. And in that gray space between diagnosis and outcome, emotions run hot and find no relief in the sterile uncertainty of a hospital environment that seems incapable of offering either good or bad news.

He became a surgeon to help people—he knows how that sounds. But after years of absorbing other people’s fear, rage, and grief, something inside him has gone quiet. The overstimulation has calcified into numbness. Not just at work. At home too.

He tries to switch roles the moment he steps through the door, tries to be _Dad_—fully present, animated, alive. But by the time he gets home, Lily is already asleep. Her door is shut, the light beneath it a thin reminder that he’s missed the window. Missed last call for connection.

——

“I thought staying would make things better for her,” he says, nodding toward Lily, who gives a nervous smile.


Mark removes another block from the lower half of the tower—right where his and Julia’s confessions have already begun to hollow out its foundation. He sets the piece on top, and the structure sways, a slow, ominous tilt that seems to signal the end.


For a moment, no one breathes.

Lily hesitates before her next turn.

She, mirroring her parents’ behavior, grips a block near the base—one of the last stable ones. Her small fingers tremble slightly.

The room goes still.

The tower topples—headfirst, collapsing under the weight of its own carefully rearranged blocks.

Lily stares at the mess, unmoving.

“This is too hard,” she mumbles, picking at the carpet with one finger. Without glancing at her parents, she rises and walks away.

“I don’t want to play anymore,” she says, the words soft, resigned, almost apologetic.

Mark and Julia look at each other—not in disbelief, but with the quiet recognition of something they’ve both known for a while.