The Last Supper

Maya sliced the papaya with practiced precision, the orange flesh glistening like something precious in the harsh kitchen light. She placed the wedge on her side of the plate, next to the vitamins she'd started taking three months ago—when she still believed supplements could fix a marriage.

"You're doing that thing again," David said from the doorway.

"What thing?" She didn't turn around.

"Acting like everything's fine. Like we didn't just spend an hour not speaking."

The goldfish in the bowl on the windowsink drifted to the surface, mouth opening and closing in silent accusation. They'd bought it on their honeymoon, a joke about low-maintenance pets. Now it was the only thing they still fed together.

"I made dinner," she said, though they both knew papaya and vitamins weren't dinner. They were what you ate when you'd forgotten how to care for yourself, let alone another person.

"Maya."

"David."

Lightning fractured the sky outside, sudden and violent. The kitchen went white for a second, illuminating everything Maya had been ignoring: the dishes stacked in the sink, the unopened mail on the counter, David's hand gripping the doorframe like he might fall.

"I saw the texts," he said quietly.

The words hit her harder than any storm. Not the messages themselves—innocent enough—but what they meant: that she had reached for her phone in the dark instead of turning toward him. That she had built entire conversations with someone else while their marriage suffocated in silence.

The goldfish swam in endless circles, trapped in glass that looked like freedom and felt like prison.

"I'm lonely here," she whispered, and the truth of it tasted like the papaya she couldn't bring herself to eat—sweet and wrong all at once. "We've been lonely for so long."

David's shoulders slumped. Something fundamental broke between them, not suddenly like lightning, but slowly, like erosion, like the way water wears down stone until there's nothing left but sand.

"I know," he said. "I know."

Outside, the rain began to fall. Inside, two people who had promised forever sat at a table with papaya and vitamins and a fish that kept swimming, not knowing it had nowhere to go.