The Storm Before Us

Mara sat at the kitchen table, her iPhone face down like a guilty secret. The storm outside had been brewing for hours—a slow accumulation of electricity in the air that made the hair on her arms stand at attention. She'd peeled three oranges in the last twenty minutes, the citrus scent sharp enough to cut through the humidity clinging to everything.

"You're going to say it, aren't you?" David stood by the refrigerator, not looking at her.

Mara's phone lit up with a notification—some meaningless update from an app she'd stopped caring about months ago. That was the thing about iPhones: they demanded your attention even when your heart was somewhere else entirely.

"I don't know what you mean."

"Bullshit." He turned then, and she saw it again—that flash of something like lightning in his eyes. The first time she'd seen it, she'd thought it was passion. Now she recognized it for what it was: warning. "You've been peeling oranges for forty minutes, Mara. You haven't eaten one. You're building up to something."

Lightning struck somewhere close, and the kitchen went white for a split second before thunder rattled the windows. In that flash of illumination, she saw everything: the way David's shoulders had begun to curl inward lately, like he was protecting himself from something she couldn't see. The way they'd stopped talking about anything that mattered. The way her phone had become her primary confidante, its screen the last thing she saw at night and the first thing she reached for in the morning.

"I'm not happy," she said, and the words felt like falling—like finally stepping off a ledge she'd been standing on for months.

David's face didn't change. He just nodded, once, like he'd been waiting for this exact moment since the last time they'd actually laughed together, which might have been last autumn or the autumn before.

"I know," he said. "Neither am I."

They stood there as the storm broke open outside, rain hammering against the roof like it was trying to tell them something about destruction and renewal. Mara reached for an orange wedge, finally hungry, while David picked up his phone and began to scroll through it—two people alone together, illuminated by the blue glow of screens, waiting for something—anything—to strike them again.