The Orange Peel

Sarah peeled the orange in the breakroom, the citrus scent cutting through the stale office air. Her hands trembled slightly—not from the cold, but from what she'd just seen. David's cubicle was empty, his family picture frame face-down on his desk. The fox-shaped paperweight she'd given him last Christmas was gone.

Three years of Wednesday lunches, of spinach salads shared while discussing existential literature and marriage dissatisfaction. Three years of being the other woman without ever quite admitting it to herself. Now he'd vanished, just like that.

She looked at the orange segments in her palm. So vibrant against the gray corporate carpet. She remembered him telling her how foxes mate for life, how he'd watched a documentary about it once, eyes intense and serious across the table. She'd thought it was romantic then.

Now she understood. Foxes mate for life, but they don't always survive together. Sometimes one gets hit by a car. Sometimes one just walks into the forest and never comes back.

The spinach from her lunch sat heavy in her stomach. She'd brought it from home—organic, expensive, the kind that comes in a plastic container with promises of health and happiness. Another promise that couldn't deliver.

Her phone buzzed. A text from Mark, her husband: 'Dinner at 7? Making that pasta you like.' Simple, reliable, safe. The life she'd built on a foundation of convenience and quiet desperation.

Sarah squeezed the orange until juice ran between her fingers. The tartness stung the small cuts on her hands—paper cuts from sorting through David's departure, from the goodbye note she'd found in his chair.

'Too real,' he'd written. 'Can't do it anymore.'

She licked the orange juice from her thumb, tasting the bitterness of peel and sweetness of fruit, all wrapped up together. The way life always is. The way heartbreak always tastes.