The Last Supper

Margaret stood at the kitchen counter, the knife pausing mid-chop over a mound of spinach. Daniel's iPhone buzzed against the marble — the fifth time in twenty minutes. She didn't need to look to know it was her. The surgical resident with the tight scrubs and endless excuses.

"You should get that," she said, her voice sounding foreign in her own kitchen.

Daniel didn't move from the table. Outside, lightning fractured the sky, illuminating the fading bruise on his cheekbone — the one he'd claimed came from a baseball game with colleagues. Margaret had believed him until she'd seen the hospital security footage, grainy and incontrovertible, showing him pressed against a supply closet wall, hands tangled in someone else's hair.

"It's just work, Margaret."

"She texted you at 2 AM, Daniel. What surgical emergency happens at 2 AM?"

The spinach wilted under her gaze, emerald leaves collapsing like the careful architecture of their marriage. She remembered their wedding night, how they'd eaten cold spinach artichoke dip in this same kitchen, drunk on possibility and cheap champagne. Now they were just drunk on the exhaustion of pretending.

"You're being ridiculous," he said, standing up. "Again."

The bear head mounted above the fireplace — Daniel's prized hunting trophy from that ill-fated trip to Montana — seemed to watch them both. Margaret had always hated its glass eyes, the way they caught the morning light. But Daniel had loved it, said it represented masculinity, conquest. Now it just looked like a warning.

Another flash of lightning. The storm had been building for days, a wall of pressure headaches and weather alerts. The news was calling it unprecedented. Margaret thought it was just the universe mirroring her internal state.

"I'm not doing this anymore," she said, setting down the knife. The spinach remained chopped, half-finished, like everything else between them.

"What?"

"The pretending. The excuses. The baseball injuries that are actually fistfights with residents."

His phone lit up again. Neither of them reached for it.

"Margaret —"

"No." She walked to the bedroom, packed a suitcase in twelve minutes flat. Some instinct, born from years of emergency room visits and late-night calls, told her to be prepared. Always be prepared. When she emerged, Daniel hadn't moved. The bear watched her go.

"You'll be back," he said.

She paused at the door, hand on the knob as thunder shook the house. "You really think you're the only one who knows how to survive?"

She drove through the lightning, toward her sister's place in the city, leaving behind the spinach and the bear and the lies and the man who'd forgotten that survival wasn't about conquest — it was about knowing when to walk away from something that was already dead.