Sudden Illumination

The fluorescent bar light above us flickered—like lightning trapped in a tube, Maria noted. She hadn't seen David in six years, not since the wedding where she'd been maid of honor and he'd gotten too drunk to give his speech without slurring.

Now they sat across from each other in this diner at 2 AM, her divorce papers fresh in her bag, his cancer diagnosis three months old. He peeled an orange with deliberate, surgical precision, his thumbs stained with citrus oil.

"I never thanked you," David said, breaking the silence that had stretched too thin between them. "For standing by me that night. Everyone else judged."

Maria looked at her own palm—her lifeline creased with anxious new lines she'd developed over the past year of separation proceedings and solo parenting. "That's what friends do," she said softly.

Outside, actual lightning forked across the sky, illuminating the flash of metal on David's head—the first time she'd seen him without the hat he used to wear to hide the thinning spots. He looked different now. Stripped bare. More honest.

"The chemo's not working," he said, so matter-of-factly it took her a moment to register the words. "Six weeks, maybe two months."

Maria reached across the Formica table and covered his hand with hers. His palm was warm, alive, impossibly present. They'd slept together once, senior year of college, after too much cheap wine and mutual loneliness. They'd never spoken of it again. Now she wondered if that was the mistake—if all these years, they'd both been pretending they hadn't felt something real.

"I'm scared," David whispered. The orange peel lay curled on the table like a strange orange flower. "Of dying without ever having been loved properly."

Maria squeezed his hand. Lightning flashed again, and in that brief illumination, she made a decision.

"Then let's love properly," she said. "Starting now."