The Ones Who Stayed
The spinach in Marcus's lunchbox had wilted into something unrecognizable—a fitting metaphor for the last three years of his marriage. He poked at it with a plastic fork, his other hand holding an orange he'd forgotten to eat. The fruit's bright dimpled skin felt absurdly cheerful against the fluorescent gray of the breakroom.
"You look like a zombie," Sarah said, sliding into the chair opposite him. She'd stopped asking if he was sleeping months ago.
Marcus nearly laughed. "Feel like one too."
They were the walking dead, both of them—swimming through days that blurred into nights, bills, backaches, the relentless current of adulthood. He'd proposed on a beach at sunset, when the sky turned that impossible orange and anything had seemed possible. Now he couldn't remember the last time they'd touched without it feeling like an obligation.
"I'm leaving after dinner," Sarah said. It wasn't a question.
Marcus nodded slowly. He'd known. You didn't live with someone for seven years without learning to read the silence between their words.
"The swimming lessons," he said suddenly. "For the kids. You promised you'd take them."
"Marcus."
"Right. They're not real. We never made them." The imaginary children they'd argued about for years—another thing to add to the list of what-ifs and nevers.
He peeled the orange, its citrus scent cutting through the stale office air. Split it in half. Offered her a piece.
Sarah hesitated, then took it. Her fingers brushed his—electric, familiar, devastating.
They sat there eating oranges in the breakroom, two people who'd loved each other once, swimming side by side through the wreckage of what they'd built. Outside, the sun began to set, painting the sky in bruised purples and that impossible orange again.
"Maybe," Marcus said, the word barely a whisper, "we could start by eating actual meals together. No more zombie dinners on the couch."
Sarah looked at him, really looked at him, for the first time in months.
"The spinach," she said. "It's still in your teeth."