Last Tuesday's Orange

Maria stood in the office kitchen, fluorescent lights humming overhead, clutching the last orange from the breakroom bowl. It had sat there for three days—her three days ofmourning her father's death, three days away from this fluorescent purgatory where Thomas would be waiting.

She peeled it slowly, citric scent cutting through the stale coffee air. The juice stung the small cut on her palm from where she'd gripped her father's bedside railing too hard that final morning.

"You're back."

Thomas's voice. She didn't turn. She could picture his hat—that ridiculous beige fedora he thought made him look artistic, like he was the office's resident intellectual rather than just another middle manager with an expired subscription to The Atlantic.

"Welcome back to the living," he said, closer now. "HR's been asking about your projects. I told them I'd step in."

Maria finally turned. His sympathetic head-tilt was practiced, transparent. The same look he'd given her when she'd been passed over for promotion last year. The water cooler bubbled behind him like a laugh track.

"My father died, Thomas. Not my career."

"Of course, of course. Terrible loss." He gestured vaguely. "But deadlines, you know. The client presentation—"

"I sent it from the hospital."

His sympathetic mask slipped. Just for a second. But she saw it—that flash of resentment that her grief hadn't incapacitated her enough to leave him an opening. The dog-eat-dog hierarchy of this place, where even death was just an opportunity to reposition yourself on the org chart.

"Right." He adjusted his hat. "Well. If you need anything..."

Maria watched him walk away, then returned to her orange. Section by section, she ate it standing alone in that humming room, each burst of sour-sweet memory of her father's voice telling her to be kind but not stupid, to mourn but not to let herself be eaten.

The juice ran down her fingers, sticky and golden, and for the first time in three days, she didn't feel like disappearing.