The Lettuce Between Us

Elena had become, in her own estimation, a rather terrible spy.

For three weeks, she'd been tracking Marcus's movements with the enthusiasm of a woman possessed and the competence of a amateur. The GPS tracker she'd purchased online — a sleek black disc meant for keys, not husbands — showed him stopping at a coffee shop she'd never heard of, then a residential neighborhood nowhere near his office. The receipts she'd found in his coat pocket: two dinners at Le Petit Bistro, a place they'd never visited together. A receipt for women's shampoo — coconut and hibiscus — when she used whatever was on sale at Target.

She felt like a zombie moving through her own life, hollowed out by suspicion, performing the rituals of marriage without any of the feeling. Her colleagues at the firm asked if she was feeling alright. She'd started leaving work early, driving past Marcus's office, sitting in her car like some private investigator from a film she'd watched alone one too many nights.

Her hair, once her crowning glory — thick chestnut waves that Marcus had run his fingers through on their first date, on their wedding night, on ordinary Tuesday mornings over coffee — now hung limp and neglected. She'd stopped coloring the grays. What was the point?

"You should eat something," her sister had said over lunch yesterday, gesturing to Elena's untouched salad. "The spinach is good, at least."

Elena had looked at the spinach as if it were radioactive. "I'm not hungry."

"You're disappearing, El."

That was exactly it. She was disappearing.

Tonight, she'd confront him. Marcus had texted that he'd be late again, another late night at the office, and Elena had decided: tonight would be the night. She'd prepared dinner anyway — spinach lasagna, his favorite, a final test. If he came home and ate it with his usual enthusiasm, perhaps she was wrong. Perhaps there was an explanation for the shampoo, the dinners, the detours.

But when she heard his key in the lock at 8:47 PM, she felt suddenly ridiculous. She was standing in their kitchen in her work clothes, spinach lasagna cooling on the counter, like some desperate housewife from a previous century. Her hair was frizzy from humidity. Her heart was pounding.

"Hey," Marcus said, walking in with his usual tired smile. "Something smells good." He paused, studying her face. "You have something —" He gestured to his own teeth. "Spinach."

Elena closed her eyes. Of course she did.

"Marcus," she said, her voice trembling. "Are you seeing someone?"

The silence stretched between them like a physical thing. She waited for him to deny it, to lie, to gaslight her. Instead, he slumped against the counter, running a hand through his thinning hair.

"No," he said quietly. "But I think I'm dying."

The biopsies had come back yesterday. Melanoma, stage three. He'd spent the past three weeks visiting specialists, getting scans, sitting alone in waiting rooms reading outdated magazines. The coconut shampoo was for his mother — she was staying with him after his first appointment, crying in the passenger seat of his car, her own hair thinning from chemotherapy. The dinners were her favorites, from her treatment days, before she'd gone into remission the first time.

"I didn't know how to tell you," Marcus said, and Elena saw then that he had been the zombie, moving through his fear alone, protecting her from something she deserved to know. "I didn't want you to look at me like —"

"Like what?"

"Like I'm already gone."

She crossed the kitchen and wrapped her arms around him, burying her face in his shirt. He felt solid and real and terrified. All those weeks she'd been spying on him, constructing elaborate betrayals in her mind, he'd been sitting in oncology clinics, making alone decisions about treatments and prognoses, carrying a burden he'd mistaken for protection.

"We'll figure it out," she whispered into his chest. "Together."

The lasagna burned while they held each other in the kitchen. Neither of them cared.