Papaya Season

The papaya sat on the counter, its yellow skin mottled with brown, like something dying beautifully. David had bought it yesterday during what he called his 'health kick' — along with the vitamin supplements that lined our bathroom cabinet like accusations.

"You should eat more fruit," he'd said, setting the papaya down next to my coffee cup. "It'll help."

Help what? The insomnia? The distance growing between us like a slow-moving tumor? The way I'd started sleeping in the guest room because his breathing had become the sound of someone I couldn't remember choosing?

Our friend Maya had noticed it first, the unraveling. At dinner last week, she'd watched us across the table, her cat-like gaze missing nothing. "You guys seem quiet," she'd said, and David had squeezed my hand, his fingers cold.

"Just tired," he'd said, and I'd nodded, my dinner untouched.

Now the papaya was softening, its sweetness turning fermentative in the summer heat. I watched it while I waited for David to come home from work, though I didn't know what I'd say when he did. I'd spent the morning going through his phone — the bear of a burden that had driven me to it, the weight of suspicion that had made me hollow inside. What I'd found hadn't surprised me, not really. Just confirmation of what I'd already known in my bones: there was someone else.

The front door clicked open. David's key in the lock. I heard him drop his bag, heard the familiar rhythm of his movement through the house. Then he was in the kitchen, standing beside me, looking at the papaya.

"It's ripe," he said. "We should eat it before it goes bad."

His hand brushed my shoulder, light as breath. I turned to face him, and the truth sat between us like the fruit on the counter — sweet, inevitable, already beginning to rot.