Last Call at the Oasis

The glass of water sat untouched on the conference table, condensation weeping down its sides like the entire department's collective anxiety. Sarah watched it, transfixed, as Marcus paced behind her, his voice droning on about synergy and vision and whatever else corporate buzzwords he'd harvested from his latest leadership webinar.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She didn't need to look. It was probably her mother again, asking if she'd found a 'nice boy' yet, or perhaps the adoption agency confirming their appointment for next week—the one she hadn't told anyone about, not even the dog she'd impulsively adopted three months ago in a fit of loneliness. Buster, she'd named him, after her grandmother. He was currently at home, probably destroying another pair of shoes.

'Sarah?' Marcus's voice cut through her thoughts. 'Your thoughts on the Q3 deliverables?'

She looked up. Every face in the room was turned toward her—expectant, judgmental, exhausted. This was the job that had promised fulfillment but delivered only compromises. This was the relationship that had started with fireworks and ended in something that felt like dying by inches.

'I think,' she said, surprising herself, 'that I need to step out for a moment.'

The office balcony was twenty floors up. The air was thick with exhaust and the distant smell of street food carts. A small palm tree in a cracked pot struggled against the concrete skyline, its fronds browned at the edges—a plant that didn't belong here, stubbornly refusing to die.

She pulled an orange from her pocket, stolen from the communal fruit bowl that morning. Something about peeling it calmed her—the ritual of it, the spray of citrus, the brightness cutting through everything else. She'd started bringing them home after the funeral, when her father's house had been full of them. He'd loved oranges. Said they reminded him of better times.

Inside, her phone rang again. This time she answered.

'Mom, I know what you're going to say.'

'Your sister's getting divorced,' her mother said. 'She found someone else. Someone who actually listens to her.'

Sarah laughed, a short, sharp sound. The orange peel fell away in her hands, bright against the grey afternoon.

'Are you okay?' her mother asked.

Sarah looked at the palm tree, at the endless city stretching beyond it. She thought of Buster waiting at home, of the adoption papers hidden in her drawer, of the water glass still sitting on that conference table, of the life she'd carefully built that suddenly felt like someone else's architecture.

'I'm about to be,' she said. 'I really think I'm about to be.'