The Last Supper

Maya pressed her palm against the cold window of her seventh-floor apartment, watching rain streak the glass like tears. On the counter behind her, a bowl of spinach wilted slowly—much like her marriage. David would be home in twenty minutes. She knew this because she'd tracked his phone for three months, a habit that started as curiosity and metastasized into obsession.

She'd planned this dinner carefully: salmon with orange glaze, roasted asparagus, a salad of fresh spinach. All the things he claimed to love but never remembered to eat. Instead, he'd been consuming something else entirely—a series of affairs with women half her age, their vitamin-enhanced skin glowing in photographs she'd found on hidden drives. Each discovery had stripped away another layer of her dignity, leaving her raw and

ancient at thirty-eight.

The water boiled over, hissing against the burner. Maya turned off the flame, her movements precise and practiced. She wasn't cooking anymore. She was staging evidence for a crime scene where the victim was her own trust.

David arrived smelling of expensive perfume and cheap excuses. "Beautiful," he said, stepping behind her, his hand covering hers on the counter. His palm was warm against her cold skin. "You didn't have to go to all this trouble."

"I wanted to," Maya said, her voice steady. She'd practiced this moment in mirrors for weeks. "Sit. Eat."

He did, obliviously cheerful, commenting on the orange reduction, the freshness of the spinach, how she took such good care of them both. She watched him chew, swallow, smile between bites, and realized that erasing a person wasn't about dramatic confrontations or shattered dishes. It was about something smaller—the quiet space that opens up when you finally stop trying to be seen by someone who's only ever looked through you.

"I'm leaving tomorrow," she said when his plate was empty. Not a question. A fact.

David's fork paused halfway to his mouth. The silence that followed was the most honest thing between them in years.

"Okay," he said finally, and the terrible part was how easily he accepted it. How quickly he returned to his meal.

Maya stood up, walked to the bedroom, and began packing. She left the spinach on the counter, left everything except what fit in two suitcases. Some endings aren't catastrophes. Some are just doors closing softly behind you, and the realization that you were the only one standing in the room.