The Green Hour

Elena sat across from Marcus at the kitchen table, her iphone glowing between them like a third dinner guest. The notification light pulsed—work emails, probably, or maybe just another reminder about the vitamins she'd forgotten to take again.

"You're staring at it," Marcus said, not looking up from his spinach, which he was pushing around his plate with deliberate, almost surgical precision.

"I'm not." She set the phone face down. The silence between them had developed weight lately, gravitational pull. "How's your mother?"

"Same." His thumb traced the wood grain of the table. "The doctors say it's progressing. Stage three." He looked up then, and Elena saw how the months had etched themselves around his eyes—fine lines that deepened when he was tired, which was always now.

Her own hair had started falling out in clumps three weeks ago. Stress, the doctor said. She'd found a clump in the drain that morning, dark and twisted like something drowned.

"Marcus," she started, but stopped. His palm covered hers on the table—calloused, warm, the lifeline deep and unbroken.

"I know," he said. "We're trying."

They'd been trying for sixteen months. The fertility specialist spoke in percentages now, in numbers that felt like judgment. Take this vitamin cocktail, track these temperatures, exist in this two-week window of possibility. Her body had become a project, something to be optimized rather than inhabited.

"My sister says we should just stop trying," she said. "She says that's how it happens for everyone, once you give up."

"Your sister got pregnant at twenty-two on birth control." Marcus's voice was gentle. "She doesn't get to be the authority on cosmic timing."

Elena laughed, surprising herself. "Remember when we used to have normal conversations? About books, or whether to buy a house?"

"We're having a normal conversation." His thumb moved over her knuckles. "This is just what normal looks like now."

Her phone buzzed again. A reminder: Folic Acid + Vitamin D. She ignored it.

Outside, the palm tree fronds clicked in the wind—a sound like dry bones, like time measured out in rattling segments. Marcus squeezed her hand, and in that pressure, she felt it: something that could break or endure, love as a choice you made even when the math wasn't in your favor.

"Finish your spinach," she said. "It's getting cold."