The Morning After

Mara woke at 4 AM to the sound of David vomiting in the bathroom. Again. The fourth time this week. She lay in the darkness, their king bed suddenly cavernous, and realized she hadn't asked him how his appointment went yesterday. She'd meant to. But the quarterly review had eaten her alive—twelve hours of being a corporate zombie, nodding at projections she couldn't bring herself to care about, smile fixed in place while something inside her curled up and died.

She'd come home to wine already poured, David's attempt at romance despite everything. They'd drunk in silence, watching the rain streak the windows of their gentrified neighborhood, two ships passing in the increasingly wide channel between them.

Now the bathroom fan hummed. Mara got up, feet cold on the hardwood, and went to the kitchen. The display on the refrigerator glowed: 42 bottles of water consumed this week. David was tracking his hydration like it mattered, like water could flush out whatever was eating him from the inside. She'd seen the vitamin supplements on the counter—D, B12, something for joint health—as if the right combination could fix a body that had already made its decision.

She found him on the bathroom floor later, back against the tile, eyes closed. His running shoes sat in the corner, still dusty from the 5K he'd forced himself through Sunday, the one where he'd collapsed at mile three and pretended it was heat exhaustion.

"They want to start chemo next week," he said, eyes still closed. "It's not going to work. They gave me percentage numbers, Mara. Single digits."

She sat beside him on the floor, the tile shocking against her thighs. This was what she'd been running from—the weight of it, the terrifying specificity of it. She'd become a zombie by choice, checking out because the alternative was this: watching the person she loved most become someone she didn't recognize, suffering she couldn't fix no matter how many vitamins she bought or glasses of water she pressed into his hands.

David reached for her hand, his skin already feeling different—thinner, somehow translucent at the edges. "I'm scared," he said.

"Me too," she said, and the dam finally broke. She cried until her chest ached, letting herself feel it all—the fear, the love, the terrible unfairness. And when he pulled her close, she let him, not running anymore, not hiding, just there in the terrible bright fluorescence of the bathroom they'd chosen together three years ago, when the future still felt like something they could count on.