Spinach in Our Teeth

The funeral reception felt wrong from the start — open bar, forced laughter, Marcus's mother weeping into a palm frond arrangement someone had mistaken for appropriate. Elaine stood by the buffet, picking spinach from her teeth with her tongue, watching me approach.

'Still running from everything, I see,' she said, not looking up.

'I'm here, aren't I?' The words tasted like bile. Marcus had been dead three days and already the old patterns resurfaced — Elaine cutting, me deflecting, both of us pretending the last five years hadn't happened.

'Marcus told me about the job offer,' she said finally. 'The one you turned down.'

'That was never real.' But something in my voice betrayed me.

She laughed, the same sharp sound that had drawn me to her in college. 'He showed me the email, Sarah. The startup. San Francisco. You said no because — what? You were scared? Or because you knew I'd be there too?'

The spinach between her teeth was distracting. I wanted to hand her a mirror, a toothpick, anything to stop this conversation.

'I said no because it wasn't right.'

'Right.' She picked up a drink. 'Like it wasn't right when we kissed at your wedding? Or when you almost left him that Christmas in Palm Springs?' She gestured at the funeral flowers. 'Some things you just keep running from until they catch you.'

Marcus's brother approached, looking between us. 'You two want to say something about him? For the service?'

Elaine's eyes met mine. For a moment, everything unsaid hung there — five years of avoidance, the debt we owed each other, the way Marcus had been the only thing keeping us from either destroying or completing what we'd started.

'We were friends,' I said, the truth small and terrible. 'All three of us.'

She nodded once, accepting the half-truth, and walked away. The spinach was still in her teeth. Some things, I realized, you just don't fix.