The Storm Before

The night David told me he was leaving, a storm was brewing over Lake Michigan. I'd spent the evening preserving oranges—sectioning them, packing them in syrup, sealing them against the coming winter. Something about the ritual comforted me. The kitchen smelled of citrus and simmering sugar, sweet and cloying, while the air outside grew heavy with ozone.

'You never asked me what I wanted,' David said, standing in the doorway. He'd just come in from checking the boat. Water dripped from his hair onto his shirt collar. 'Not in twenty-three years.'

I set down my knife. 'I asked you to stay. That's what I wanted.'

'That's not what I mean.' He ran a hand through his damp hair. Outside, lightning forked across the sky, illuminating the kitchen in harsh flashes. 'We've been carrying each other's corpses for a decade, Elena. Yours is heavier.'

The accusation hit harder than it should have. Maybe because it was true. Maybe because I'd spent so long performing the role of wife that I'd forgotten how to be anything else. The orange segments in their glass jar looked grotesquely preserved—dead things suspended in artificial sweetness.

'What do you want?' I asked.

'To feel something again.' He stepped closer. 'Even if it hurts. Especially if it hurts.'

The power went out. Darkness swallowed us, and in that void, something cracked open. Not the marriage—that had been hollow for years. Something deeper. I realized I'd been waiting for permission to exhale.

'Go,' I said, and my voice didn't shake. 'But come back when you figure out if the problem was us or just yourself.'

He left in the storm. I stood in the dark kitchen listening to the rain, and finally, properly, I cried. Not for him. For the years I'd spent waterlogged with my own silence, for the life I'd preserved in amber instead of living. Lightning struck somewhere close, and the resulting thunder shook the house. Outside, the world was being washed clean.

I opened a jar of oranges. The syrup was cool against my fingers, the fruit impossibly bright in the darkness. I ate one segment, then another. They tasted like survival.