Division of Assets

The kitchen table was covered in that awful legal-yellow notepad paper, lists of things neither of them wanted but both were too exhausted to fight about anymore. Sarah watched Marcus methodically categorizing ten years of accumulation into his and hers columns, his pen scratching like the metabolism of something small and dying.

They'd agreed on the house—she kept it, he took the equity payout. They'd agreed on the car—his promotion to regional vice president demanded something newer anyway. But it was the small things that kept catching, the unexpected anchors in the drift of their shared life.

"The dog," Marcus said, not looking up from his list. "Barnaby stays with you. You've got the yard, the schedule. It wouldn't be fair."

Sarah felt something unravel in her chest. Barnaby, their ancient golden retriever who'd comforted her through three miscarriages and Marcus's mother's funeral, who'd slept between them when sex became too loaded with expectation, who'd been the one constant in a decade of gradual erosion—was being assigned like a piece of furniture. She remembered when they'd brought him home, both so young and certain that love was enough, that the right kind of love could withstand anything. Now Marcus was talking about what was "fair" as if fairness had anything to do with the way lives and hearts actually break.

"The baseball stuff," she countered. "Your signed cards, the memorabilia from when you played college ball. You were going to teach our son someday. That was always the plan."

Marcus finally looked at her then, really looked at her, and she saw the same tired recognition she felt. The son who never existed had become its own kind of ghost between them, a shared hallucination they'd both stopped mentioning years ago but neither had ever quite stopped grieving separately. The baseball collection was just another museum exhibit for a future that had quietly, mercilessly failed to arrive.

"Take it," he said. "Donate it. I don't care anymore."

They kept working through the list in silence, the afternoon light sliding across the floorboards until it caught on a solitary orange in a ceramic bowl Sarah's mother had given them as a wedding gift. Perfectly round, impossibly bright against the beige and gray of everything else, it seemed to mock the whole exercise of dividing what no longer wanted to be divided.

"Orange," Sarah said. Marcus looked up, confused. "We have to decide. Who gets the last orange?"

For the first time in months, something almost like recognition passed between them—not understanding, exactly, but the knowledge that they were both still inside the same loss, still walking through the same ruin. Marcus stood up, walked over to the bowl, and peeled the orange right there, tearing into it with his fingers, juice running down his wrist. He divided it into two halves and handed one to Sarah.

"We split it," he said. "Like we should have done everything else."