The Last Orange

Mara sat on the balcony of her forty-second floor apartment, watching the sunset bleed across the Chicago skyline. The sky was a bruised **orange**, the color of the shirt Thomas wore the day he told her he was leaving. Three years later, and the color still stopped her breath.

Inside, her cat—a ragged tomcat she'd foolishly named Bear—paced along the glass door, his gold eyes fixed on something she couldn't see. She'd found him as a stray outside her office building, mewling in the rain, something ferocious about his survival instinct. Now he was her only witness to the slow dismantling of a life.

She could still **bear** the weight of those last months with Thomas. The way he'd stopped touching her. The arguments that started in whispers and ended in silences that stretched for days. The careful distance he'd cultivated, like a man preparing for an escape he hadn't yet announced.

The divorce papers sat on the counter, final as a gravestone. She signed them yesterday.

Bear butted his head against her hand, demanding attention. His fur was thick against her palm, warm and insistently alive. She scratched behind his ears, and he purred—a sound like a tiny engine, something relentless and forgiving.

She peeled the **orange** she'd been holding, its bright zest misting the air. The sections burst on her tongue, sharp and sweet and leaving her fingers sticky. It was exactly the kind of mundane detail Thomas would have noticed once, early on, when he still cataloged her habits like they were precious.

The sun slipped below the horizon. The last light caught Bear's fur, turning him briefly gold.

She'd learned something in the aftermath: you don't get to choose what you **bear**, only how you carry it. The weight doesn't disappear. You just grow stronger around it, like a tree growing bark around a wound.

Bear settled into her lap, heavy and purring. Outside, the city flickered to life, a million little lights marking a million small existences.

She ate the rest of the **orange** in the gathering dark, and for the first time in three years, the color didn't make her think of Thomas at all.