Citrus and Silver

Mara stood in the bathroom of the apartment she used to call home, peeling an orange with hands that wouldn't stop shaking. The citrus scent hit her—sour, sharp, terribly familiar. Elena had always kept a bowl of oranges on the counter. Some pointless gesture of domesticity in a marriage that had been hollowing out from the inside for years.

She looked in the mirror. Her hair, once the same dark mahogany as Elena's, was now shot through with silver at the temples. Three weeks of not sleeping. Three weeks since she'd come home early from a conference to find her best friend of twenty years in bed with her husband.

The word *friend* had become a kind of curse in her mouth, something foreign and sharp she couldn't spit out fast enough.

They were probably doing this right now—some elaborate rehearsal dinner, toasts to forever and always. Elena had that kind of theatricality. She would have planned everything down to the color of the napkins, never once considering that she was building a new life on top of someone else's ruins.

Mara watched a drop of orange juice run down her wrist, staining her skin. She thought about calling Elena's mother, telling her everything. She thought about burning the photos, the years, the shared secrets they'd whispered across dorm rooms and cheap wine and long nights that felt like they would never end.

Instead, she finished peeling the orange, separating each section with deliberate precision. Some things you dismantle carefully. Others, you just let rot.

She dropped the peel into the toilet and flushed, watching it spiral away. Tomorrow she would dye her hair blonde. Something new. Something that didn't look like anything Elena had ever known.