The Last Supper

Maya watched him chew. The spinach stuck between his front teeth—a tiny green flag of surrender, or perhaps defiance. Three years of marriage, and James still didn't notice how she studied him during dinner.

"The doctor says I need a vitamin D supplement," he said, already moving on, his mind clearly somewhere else. Always somewhere else these days. "Probably from too much time indoors."

Maya's fingers tightened around her wine glass. The words hung between them like something unsaid, something heavier than vitamins and health.

"Remember when we went swimming in Lake Tahoe that summer?" she asked, her voice barely steady. "You said you'd never felt more alive."

James shrugged, his attention already drifting toward his phone on the table. The screen lit up—another message, another world that wasn't this one.

"That was three years ago, Maya. People change."

People change. The phrase echoed in the silence between them. She thought about the baseball games they used to watch, how he'd scream at the television with such pure joy, his hand finding hers in the excitement without thinking. Now he barely looked up from his work emails during dinner.

The bear in the room—his affair, or whatever it was—had been sitting at their table for months. She'd never asked directly. Somehow not knowing made it less real, gave her deniability, allowed her to keep setting his place at dinner like everything was fine.

"I'm thinking of leaving," she said, finally giving voice to what had been growing inside her like a tumor.

James's fork paused halfway to his mouth. The spinach still clung to his teeth, ridiculous and small against the enormity of what she'd just said.

"What?"

"I think you heard me."

He set down his fork, finally really looking at her. But it was too late for that. The moment for seeing had passed, somewhere between the emails and the late nights at work, somewhere in the thousands of tiny choices that had accumulated like sediment, burying them both.

"Maya, don't be dramatic. This is just a rough patch."

"A rough patch is a bad week, James. This is erosion."

She stood up, her chair scraping against the floor, and walked toward the bedroom to pack. Behind her, she could hear him resume chewing, the sound sickeningly ordinary. Some endings, she realized, don't arrive with thunder or drama—they come quietly, between bites of dinner, while someone else is thinking about vitamins and work emails and all the things that matter more than you do.