The Spinach in His Teeth

Elena first noticed the spinach during what was supposed to be a celebratory dinner. James had come home late again—third time that week—muttering something about a merger at the investment firm where he'd worked for seven years. As he laughed at some story about his boss Mark, a fleck of green stuck stubbornly between his front teeth.

It should have been charming. Instead, she felt that familiar coldness spreading through her chest, the same sensation she'd had three months ago when she'd found the receipt for a swimming pool membership in a town forty miles away. James couldn't swim. He'd told her so on their first date, explaining a near-drowning incident at age six that left him with a lifelong phobia of water deeper than a bathtub.

"You have something," she said, reaching across the table.

He flinched. That was new—James never flinched from her touch. But then he smiled, that careful expression she'd begun to recognize as manufactured. "Thanks, El. You're always looking out for me."

Outside, lightning split the sky, illuminating the window in a sudden white flash. In that moment, she saw the face of the man she'd married seven years ago, the man she'd thought she knew, and wondered if she'd ever really seen him at all.

The spy thing had started as a joke between them. After binge-watching too many episodes of that show about the bored housewife who becomes an intelligence operative, Elena would tease James about his late nights, his sudden business trips, the way his phone always seemed to be face-down on the table. "What are you really doing?" she'd ask, laughing. "Are you a spy?"

And he'd laugh back, always with that slight hesitation before the sound, as if he needed to remind himself what genuine laughter sounded like. "If I were, darling, I'd tell you about it. Unless they got to you first."

She'd laughed. God, how she'd laughed.

Now she watched him chew the spinach salad she'd prepared—spinach, because he'd told her he was trying to eat healthier, trying to live longer for them—and thought about the swim bag she'd found hidden in the trunk of his car yesterday. The receipt for swimming lessons. The waterproof watch she'd never seen before.

"El?" James asked. "You okay? You haven't touched your food."

Lightning flashed again, closer this time. Thunder rumbled through the floorboards beneath their feet.

"I'm fine," she said, and realized with a strange calm that she was. "Just thinking."

"About what?"

She looked at him—really looked at him—at the way his eyes didn't quite meet hers, at the spinach still caught between his teeth, at the man she'd loved for seven years who might not actually exist.

"About swimming," she said. "I was thinking I might learn. This summer. Would you take lessons with me?"

His fork stopped midway to his mouth. The silence stretched between them, charged and electric as the storm outside.

"James?" she pressed gently.

Then he did something she'd never seen in all their years together. He smiled—really smiled, without that careful hesitation, without the manufactured warmth. A smile that was tired and resigned and somehow completely genuine.

"Actually," he said, "I already know how."