Salt & Citrus

The deposition room smelled like stale coffee and desperate men. Sarah pressed her **palm** against the cool glass, watching the city bleed into sunset—everything washed in **orange** light, the color of warning and nostalgia. She'd been sitting across from Marcus for six hours, his lawyer objecting to every question, while the truth dissolved like sugar in cold **water**.

"You knew the building was structurally unsound," she said, not a question.

Marcus looked at his hands. His thumbs were stained the same burnt orange as the cigarettes he chain-smoked on the fire escape. "We thought we had time."

"The single mother on the fourth floor didn't."

Silence stretched, thick and suffocating. Sarah thought about her daughter, waiting at home with a sitter, the way she'd pressed her small palm against Sarah's cheek that morning, whispering *don't be sad, mommy* as if children could smell grief on their parents like pheromones.

Marcus's lawyer leaned forward. "My client has already answered—"

"I haven't." Marcus's voice cracked. "The soil samples were altered. The water table had risen. We knew."

Sarah stopped writing. The truth, finally—raw and ugly as an exposed nerve.

"Why?"

"Because the orange groves were worth more than the tenants." He met her eyes then, and she saw it: not malice, but the ordinary cowardice of men who decide somewhere along the line that their convenience outweighs another's survival. "I told myself it wasn't my decision to make."

"It never is," she said quietly. "Until it is."

She packed her bag. Outside, the city burned orange against the darkening sky, palm fronds silhouetted like skeletal fingers against the light. She thought of water rising, of foundations cracking, of all the things we let happen in the spaces between our silence and our complicity.

At home, her daughter slept with her cheek against a stuffed rabbit, her small palm open and trusting on the duvet. Sarah pressed her own palm against it, careful not to wake her, and stood watch in the orange glow of the nightlight, promising this time would be different.