Electric Green

The spinach was wilting in Marcus's refrigerator, dark green leaves turning translucent at the edges, much like whatever had once existed between us. I stood in his kitchen during the storm, watching lightning fracture the sky beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, each flash illuminating the pool deck outside where we'd first said things we couldn't take back.

"You're still here," Marcus said from the doorway. His hat—that ridiculous fedora he'd started wearing after his promotion—sat crooked on his head. He thought it made him look like a creative director. It made him look like a midlife crisis in felt.

"The spinach," I said, gesturing vaguely toward the refrigerator. "It was organic. From the farmer's market. That weekend we drove upstate and pretended we were people who didn't hate each other."

Thunder shook the glass. Outside, the pool's surface churned in the wind, reflecting each lightning strike in violent bursts of white. We'd conceived his daughter in that pool, drunk on expensive tequila and the mistaken belief that loving someone meant tolerating their absence.

"She asked about you," Marcus said quietly. "Beatrice. At dinner tonight. She wanted to know why you don't come over anymore."

The cruelty of it—him telling me this now, when we'd already signed the papers, when the house was going on the market next week. The spinach had been my contribution to this kitchen. I'd filled his refrigerator with things that required care, attention, timely consumption. He'd filled my bed with his absence.

"Tell her the spinach died," I said. "Tell her sometimes things just forget how to live."

I walked to the window, watching my reflection ghost over the pool. Another lightning strike, closer this time. The power flickered. In the darkness, I almost reached for him, three years of muscle memory resisting deletion. But the lights surged back on, and there he was: a man in a hat, standing in a kitchen that was never really ours, while the woman he'd actually marry was probably already wondering why he was late.

"Goodbye, Marcus."

The spinach could stay. Let his new wife find it. Let her wonder who bought it, who it was for, what kind of person filled a refrigerator with things that needed so much attention from someone who had so little to give.