The Last Supper

The orange light of sunset flooded through the kitchen window, illuminating everything we hadn't said for three years. Marcus stood by the counter, his dark hair—once so thick, now thinning at the temples—catching the amber glow. He was crushing his morning vitamin supplements with the practiced efficiency of a man who'd spent a decade convincing himself that prevention was the same thing as living.

"You're running again," I said, not a question. His running shoes sat by the door, still dew-soaked from dawn.

"It clears my head."

"Your head has never been clearer."

On the windowsill, the goldfish darted in its bowl—a wedding gift from his mother, now six years old and somehow still alive despite our best efforts at neglect. I watched it pulse against the glass, that endless, mindless circling, and wondered if fish experienced existential dread or if that was exclusively our domain.

"Elena—"

"Don't." My voice cracked. "Just don't."

He turned then, and I saw it: the same exhaustion I felt mirrored in his eyes. We were two people who'd built something together—careers, a home, a life that looked perfect from the outside—while watching it slowly hollow out from within. The vitamin routine, the running, the dinner parties where we performed happiness like a well-rehearsed play. All of it maintenance without purpose.

"I met someone," he said quietly.

The words didn't shock me. They settled over me like snow, inevitable and cold.

"Is she younger?" I asked, and he didn't answer. "Does she make you feel like you haven't wasted your forties becoming a person you don't recognize?"

"I didn't want this to become something we resented each other for."

"Too late."

Later, as I packed boxes in the bedroom I'd chosen paint colors for with such optimism seven years ago, I found the old photograph of us on our honeymoon. We were tanned and unlined, holding oranges we'd bought from a roadside stand in Italy, laughing at something neither of us could remember now. The woman in that photo believed in something—forever, maybe, or at least the possibility of it.

I placed the photo in the donate box. The goldfish, I decided, would go to Marcus. Something should survive this, even if it was just a fish swimming in circles, waiting for someone to remember to feed it.