The Score We Settle

The papaya sat on the kitchen counter, its yellow-green skin mottled with brown spots—too ripe, like everything else in my life lately. Marcus had brought it over yesterday, standing in my doorway with that casual grin he'd worn since we played Little League baseball together. 'Just picked it up,' he'd said. 'Thought you might want to try something new.'

I'd taken it, of course. That's what old friends do. They accept small offerings and pretend not to notice the larger thefts.

Now I sliced into the fruit, its flesh the color of a sunset I'd watched from a beach in Mexico with Sarah—the same beach where Marcus had supposedly been 'working late' during our company's quarterly retreat. The padel courts had been empty that night, according to the resort staff I'd called later. Just as his room had been.

I ate a spoonful. Bitter. I'd never tasted papaya before, and now I understood why Marcus had chosen it. It was an acquired taste—something you had to learn to appreciate, like betrayal.

My phone buzzed. A text from Sarah: 'Can we talk?'

Outside, palm fronds rustled in the wind, their shadows moving across the floor like time-lapse photography of everything I'd lost. I thought about the baseball glove gathering dust in my closet, the way Marcus had always been the better player, the way he'd somehow always known when to swing for the fences and when to bunt. I'd never minded losing to him then. We were kids.

But corporate politics wasn't a game, and Sarah wasn't a trophy to be won.

I scraped the rest of the papaya into the trash, washed the bowl, and replied to Sarah: 'Not yet.'

Some scores, I realized, you settle alone. And some fruits, no matter how ripe they look, are best left uneaten.