The Last Dinner

You never really know someone. That's what Elena told me the night she showed up at my door with takeout containers and that crooked smile I'd trusted for seven years. We sat on my living room floor, the glow of the television casting long shadows across her face as some rom-com played on the premium cable I'd finally sprung for after my promotion.

"Try this," she said, pushing a container of creamed spinach toward me. "Your favorite." And it was—she remembered everything. How I took my coffee, my irrational fear of bears since that camping trip in Montana where we'd huddled together in a tent while something massive snuffled outside. She'd held my hand then, whispering that we'd be okay. We were twenty-three and invincible.

Now I was thirty, and she was telling me between careful bites of curry that she'd been hired by my company's competitor eighteen months ago. That our weekly dinners, our drunken confessions about work, my tearful breakdowns over office politics—it had all been fieldwork. She wasn't my friend. She was a spy, and she'd just sold them everything.

"I didn't mean to—" she started, and I actually laughed. Not because it was funny, but because the alternative was screaming, and I've never been the screaming type.

The worst part wasn't the betrayal. It was the way she looked at me with those careful eyes, calculating, weighing the cost of honesty against the price of loyalty and choosing her career. The spinach tasted like ash in my mouth. On screen, the characters were falling in love, all swelling strings and soft lighting, and Elena's phone kept buzzing with emails from her new bosses—my old bosses, now.

"You should go," I said, and she did, leaving me alone with my half-eaten dinner and the realization that the person who knew me best was never really there at all. The bear outside the tent had been more honest—at least we knew it wanted to eat us.