Collateral Damage

The spinach had gone slimy in the crisper drawer, much like everything else in their marriage—neglected until unrecognizable. Maya stood in the kitchen of the apartment she'd already vacated, packing the last box while Simon watched from the doorway.

"You're taking the dog?" Simon asked, and Maya almost laughed at how quickly he'd moved from we-can-work-this-out to asset division.

"Buster's my dog, Simon. You never liked him anyway."

"I liked him fine."

"You called him a needy asshole every time he wanted to play."

Her iPhone buzzed on the counter—her mother again, wanting to know if she'd signed the papers yet, if she'd found a lawyer, if she was eating. Maya silenced it. She was thirty-five, not fifteen, but somehow her mother still thought she needed supervision during heartbreak.

The cat, Luna, wound around Maya's ankles, purring like she'd personally orchestrated the dissolution. Simon had fought for custody of Luna, conceded Buster, and Maya had let him, knowing he'd never notice that Luna preferred her anyway. The cat would return on her own terms, as cats always did.

"What about the pool membership?" Simon asked. "We paid for the year."

"You can have it. You and what's-her-name can swim laps together."

"I told you, nothing happened with Jessica until after you left."

"Right. And I'm the one who went slimy in the crisper drawer."

She threw the spinach into the trash, watching it land with a wet thwack beside Simon's forgotten protein shake containers. The apartment smelled like chlorine from the pool downstairs and his expensive cologne and something else—maybe just the long rot of two people who'd stopped trying.

"Maya—" he started, but she was already lifting Buster's carrier, the dog whining softly inside, like he knew they were leaving something behind even as they moved toward something else.

"Don't," she said. "Just don't."

She walked out without looking back, leaving Simon to his pool memberships and his explanations and the strange new silence that would fill rooms where, for seven years, there had been noise and life and something like love, once. The iPhone lit up in her pocket—her mother again—but Maya kept walking, toward the elevator, toward the street, toward whatever came next, carrying a dog and a ghost and the strange lightness of having nothing left to lose.