The Last Supper Before

The orange sat on the table between us like a small, wounded sun. Marcus had picked it up from the bodega on 14th Street—that gesture that used to mean tenderness, now just another reflex in a dying animal of a marriage.

'I don't want the spinach,' I said, pushing the bowl away. It lay there, wilted and dark, like something already given up on.

'Marcus, we need to talk about the money.' The words hung between us, heavier than the silence that had been accumulating for months.

He looked up, his eyes tired. 'The market's been a bear all week, Sarah. You know this.'

'A bear? You went all in on a tech IPO that cratered. That wasn't the market—that was you playing bull again.' I couldn't keep the edge out of my voice. 'You promised after last time.'

He peeled the orange, his fingers stained with citrus. 'I was trying. For us.'

'Thirty thousand dollars, Marcus. That was our emergency fund.' I thought about all the conversations we'd avoided, all the fights we'd swallowed whole like bitter pills. 'You keep charging at things, horns out, thinking force will solve it.'

'I did it for us,' he said again, but the words were thin.

The spinach cooled between us. I watched the steam rise, thinking how food was the first thing to go when love died—the shared meals, the small intimacies of feeding each other.

'What happens now?' he asked.

I looked at the orange segments on his plate, bright against the white ceramic. 'I think we both know.'

Outside, the city hummed with the relentless energy of people who still believed in things. In here, the market had already closed. The bull had gored us, the bear had hibernated through our winter, and now there was only this—two strangers eating dinner at the end of something that had once been everything.

I picked up my fork. 'Eat your spinach, Marcus.'

He did. And in the quiet that followed, we both heard it: the sound of marriage ending, not with a shout, but with the scraping of silverware against plates, the dull ache of forgiveness refused, and the terrible weight of finally letting go.