The Color of Goodbye

She'd been running for forty-five minutes when her phone buzzed in the pouch—a text from him asking about the dog. They'd split the custody arrangement like everything else: equitable, rational, agonizing. She kept running, the pavement blurring beneath her sneakers, sweat slicking her back.

At the grocery store, she moved through the produce section on autopilot. Spinach. She dropped two bunches into her cart, remembering how he'd always complain it tasted like grass, how she'd promise to sauté it with garlic this time, really make it sing. Some fights were small and green and leafy.

The orange caught her eye—those undersized, overpriced ones imported from Spain. She'd bought them once, early on, when she still believed that effort could manufacture sweetness. They'd been dry and disappointing. She learned eventually: you can't force flavor from barren soil.

"Excuse me," a woman said, reaching past her for papayas. The woman's cart held a single item—just the papayas, six of them, ripe and fragrant. "My husband loves them," the woman explained, catching her stare. "Can't find them anywhere."

She nodded, throat tight. Some people still searched.

At home, the dog greeted her with desperate enthusiasm, as if she'd been gone years instead of an hour. His dog now, technically. The visitation schedule said she had him Tuesdays and Thursdays. She'd argued for more, but in the end, what could you really negotiate from someone who'd already stopped choosing you?

She wilted the spinach in a pan, watching it collapse into something smaller, something manageable. The refrigerator hummed its electric monotony. Outside, the sky turned that particular shade of orange that comes just before everything goes dark—not beautiful, just inevitable.

Tomorrow she'd run again. She'd shop again. She'd take the dog for walks and pretend this was enough. For now, she ate standing up, spinach bitter on her tongue, while the papaya woman's happiness echoed in the empty aisles of her mind.

Some days you just put one foot in front of the other. That was the whole trick.