The Last Supper of Strangers

Maya sat across from Thomas at the bistro where they'd first met seven years ago, wearing the funeral hat she'd bought that morning — black velvet, wide-brimmed, ridiculous. She felt like a sphinx perched on a limestone ledge, inscrutable and ancient, watching the man who used to love her try to remember why he'd proposed.

"You're not eating," Thomas said, gesturing to her plate.

The spinach lay wilted beneath balsamic glaze, a garden's ruin in miniature. She'd ordered it because it was what her mother used to force upon her as a child, those raw leaves that tasted like earth and resentment and all the things good girls were supposed to swallow without complaint.

"I'm not hungry," Maya said, which was not true. She was starving — for recognition, for desire, for anything other than this polite disintegration.

Thomas's phone lit up on the table. A work email. He didn't apologize, just reached for it with the same automaticity with which he'd reached for her hand in bed those first months, before touch became theoretical.

The sphinx had known riddles. Here was hers: At what point does a relationship become a habit you're too cowardly to break? When does the man sleeping beside you become the stranger you make breakfast for?

"We should sell the condo," she said. The words felt foreign, like she was speaking a language she'd once known but had allowed to atrophy.

Thomas looked up, screen still glowing. "What?"

"The condo. I want my own place."

He blinked. "Maya, we're getting married in three months."

"No," she said, surprised by her own calm. "We're not."

Outside, rain began to streak the windowpane like the world itself was weeping for what they'd almost become. The spinach remained untouched on her plate, a small green surrender she was finally brave enough to refuse.