The Last Supper

Emma picked at the spinach wilting on her plate, her appetite gone the moment she saw the notification light up his iPhone screen face-down on the table. Three soft buzzes in ten minutes. No one texts that desperately at 8 PM on a Tuesday unless they're hungry for something they can't have.

"You're not eating," David said, finally looking up from his own phone. A stray lock of hair fell over his forehead — the same chestnut wave she'd once run her fingers through while they talked about buying a house, having children, growing old together in a world that felt somehow more generous then.

"I'm not hungry anymore."

He sighed, that familiar performance of patience he'd perfected over seven years. "Em, we talked about this. It's work. The merger is —"

"Bullshit, David." The word came out harder than she intended, a stone dropped in still water. "I saw her face on your screen last week. Blonde, twenty-five, smiling like she's never known heartbreak."

He opened his palm across the table — a gesture of surrender, or maybe just exhaustion. "It's not what you think."

"What is it then? Because I remember when you looked at me like that. Before my hair started silvering. Before we bought that depressing goldfish that died in three weeks because we forgot to feed it. We were going to be different, David. Remember? We swore we wouldn't become people who have secrets at dinner tables."

The silence stretched between them, thick and suffocating. Outside their apartment window, the city hummed with millions of people eating, fucking, lying, loving, dying. The spinach on her plate looked suddenly obscene — a wilted reminder of everything that doesn't last.

"I think you should go," she said quietly.

He didn't argue. He just stood up, pocketed his iPhone, and left without looking back. Some endings, Emma realized, aren't dramatic. They're just the moment you finally notice what's been dead for a long time.