The Salad We Never Ate

The wilted spinach lay on my plate like something already dead. Around me, the dinner party roared with laughter at Mark's stories—the fictional deal he claimed to have closed, the investors who supposedly couldn't wait to sign. Bullshit, I thought, but I smiled. I always smiled.

"You're not eating," David whispered, his hand warm on my knee. His other hand, I noticed, was playing with the vitamin bottle in his pocket—our seventh month of fertility supplements, our seventh month of calendars and temperature charts and sex scheduled like board meetings.

"Not hungry," I said, which wasn't true. I was starving, but not for food.

Mark gestured with his wine glass, red liquid sloshing dangerously close to the white tablecloth. He was the worst kind of bull—charming, loud, utterly convinced of his own greatness. The way he looked at me sometimes, like I was something to be acquired, made my skin crawl. Last week, he'd cornered me in the breakroom. "You and David seem so stressed," he'd said, too close. "You should take a vacation. Like we did."

We. His wife was pregnant again. Third time in four years.

The spinach on my plate had turned slimy in the dressing. I thought about my mother, taking her vitamins every morning with the grim determination of someone facing down death. She'd told me once that getting older meant watching everyone else's life move forward while yours held mysteriously still. I was thirty-two, and I already felt it—the stagnation, the quiet desperation of waiting.

"David," I said softly. He looked at me, hope and exhaustion warring in his eyes. "Let's go home."

He hesitated, then nodded. We slipped out while Mark was mid-story, no one noticing. In the car, David took the vitamin bottle from his pocket and set it in the cupholder. Neither of us spoke. The engine hummed, and I watched the streetlights blur past, thinking about how we'd spend years trying to create something new while slowly, inevitably, becoming exactly who we were meant to be—whether we wanted to or not.