Citrus

Maya watched the orange surrender to her knife, its skin yielding in a long, ragged spiral that she coiled around her finger like hair. The juice misted the air, sharp and bright, catching the morning light that slanted across their—still theirs, for another week—kitchen counter.

'You're up early,' Tom said from behind her. The refrigerator door sighed closed.

Maya didn't turn. 'Couldn't sleep.'

'Again?' He moved closer, and she could hear the calculated softness in his step. 'The doctor said those B vitamins help with—'

'I stopped taking them.' She squeezed the orange into a glass, watching pulp and seeds catch in the strainer. 'They weren't working.'

The pause stretched thin between them, like the citrus scent now permeating the room.

'Maya, we should talk about—'

'Breakfast?' She finally faced him. He was wearing the boxers she'd bought him three Christmases ago, the ones with the pattern of tiny martini glasses that had made her laugh in the store, back when she could still surprise him with something as simple as novelty underwear. Now the glasses were faded at the elastic, and so was everything else.

'I'm not hungry.' His hand went to his pocket—that reflex she'd learned to read, the phone-check, the Sarah-check. 'I have that meeting with Julian.'

'Make yourself some eggs,' she said. 'There's spinach in the crisper. Use it before it goes bad.' Like us, she didn't say.

The spinach had been a compromise. She'd wanted kale; he'd insisted on spinach because it wilted better, was less bitter. Everything in their eight years together had been about what wilted better, what bruised less cleanly. Even this.

Even her, standing in their kitchen on a Tuesday morning, knowing Sarah's name was on his calendar under 'lunch' every Thursday for three months, and that Sarah—her Sarah, from book club and wine nights and that weekend in wine country—had smiled when she told Maya, 'You're so lucky to have someone who really listens.'

The worst part wasn't the betrayal. It was how boring it was. How ordinary. How everyone would nod and say, 'These things happen,' and she'd nod back, and they'd all pretend infidelity was like the weather—unfortunate, unpredictable, fundamentally impersonal.

She washed her orange juice glass at the sink while Tom cracked eggs into a pan. The spinach hissed when it hit the hot oil.

'Julian says the market's turning,' Tom said, and she nodded, and he knew she wasn't listening, and she knew he knew, and the performance continued, two actors who'd forgotten their lines years ago but kept showing up for matinées because the audience—friends, family, their landlord, their shared dentist—expected a show.

The sun moved across the counter. The orange peel on the cutting board was already drying, curling at the edges, its essential oils evaporating into nothing.