The Last Supper at Malibu

The worst part wasn't that he'd told me he wanted a divorce over lunch. It was that I'd had **spinach** stuck in my teeth the entire time.

We were at that overpriced restaurant on the cliffside, the one with the **palm** trees perfectly framing the ocean view like a postcard from someone else's honeymoon. Mark was pushing his food around his plate, not meeting my eyes. "I think we've grown apart," he said, and all I could think about was how many times I'd smiled at him across tables like this over eight years, and whether any of those smiles had carried green debris in them.

"We haven't grown apart," I said, finally. "We've just stopped playing together. Remember **padel**? We used to play every Sunday morning."

"You stopped enjoying it," he said quietly. "You stopped enjoying everything."

The accusation landed like a stone. I'd been carrying so much grief for my mother, dead three years now, that I'd forgotten how to be light. How to be the woman he'd married.

Our **dog**, Barnaby, had died the same month as Mom. I'd thrown myself into work, into promotion after promotion, until I'd become someone who answered emails at midnight and drank too much chardonnay while Mark fell asleep beside me.

I drove to the office afterward, sat staring at the brass **sphinx** paperweight on my desk—a gift from my first big client. The sphinx asked nothing, offered everything. All those riddles I'd been trying to solve: how to be successful and present, how to honor the dead without joining them, how to love without consuming.

"Growing apart," Mark had called it. But the truth was simpler: I'd been trying to become a mystery to myself, and he'd stopped trying to solve me.

Back at our empty house, I found myself at the bathroom mirror, finally picking that piece of spinach from between my front teeth. It had been there for hours. How many things had I been carrying around for years that were just as visible, just as easily removed, if only someone had told me?

Or maybe they had. Maybe I just hadn't been listening.