The Last Supper

The spinach lay wilted on Mara's plate, a garnish of surrender. Forty-two years old and she was still making salads she didn't want to eat, still smiling across the table at a husband whose name felt foreign on her tongue.

"You're not eating," David said. Not a question. An accusation wrapped in concern.

"Not hungry." The lie tasted like iron.

David's jaw clenched—the bear waking from hibernation. She'd seen that jaw clench a thousand times. At their wedding. At her father's funeral. When she told him she wasn't ready for children. When, years later, she finally was, and he wasn't.

"I made it," he said. "Your favorite."

My favorite, she thought. When? Twenty years ago? When I was twenty-two and desperate to be loved?

"Thank you," she said. "I'll eat it later."

He took a bite, chewed deliberately. The silence stretched until it snapped.

"You've been distant," he said. "Since the promotion."

The promotion. The fox that had slipped into their henhouse. Not hers—his. He'd made director while she'd stagnated in middle management, his success a mirror reflecting her own failures. Or maybe it was her success. She'd finally stopped measuring herself by his standards, found a job where she actually mattered, and somehow that was the betrayal.

"I'm not distant," she said. "I'm just tired."

"Tired of what?"

"Of this." The words escaped before she could catch them. "Of pretending everything's fine. Of smiling when I want to scream. Of being the person you married instead of the person I've become."

David's fork clattered against his plate. "What are you saying?"

I'm saying I met someone, she thought. I'm saying she sees me. I'm saying for the first time in twenty years, I don't have to explain myself.

"I'm saying," Mara said, "that I don't know if I love you anymore. I don't know if I ever did, or if I just loved the idea of being loved."

The bear's eyes widened, wounded. For a moment, she felt the sharp blade of guilt—of having wounded something so massive, so accustomed to its power.

Then she remembered: she was the one who'd spent two decades shrinking herself to fit in his den.

The spinach was still wilted on her plate. She picked up her fork.

"Actually," she said, "I am hungry."

And for the first time in years, she meant it.