The Supplement

Maya pushed the spinach around her plate with her fork, watching her husband across the candlelit table. David was typing furiously on his iPhone, the blue light casting harsh shadows on his face—the same face she'd fallen in love with twelve years ago, now softened by complacency and late-night takeout.

"You promised," she said softly. The candle flickered between them like a dying heartbeat.

"One sec, just need to—"

"That's what you said an hour ago. When we sat down."

David finally looked up, his eyes slightly unfocused, as if he were still reading an email hovering in the air between them. "It's the Barnett deal, Maya. This could make us. I can't just—"

"Us?" The word tasted like ash. "When was the last time you thought about 'us' without being prompted?"

He sighed, that heavy, put-upon sigh that used to make her feel guilty for asking for anything. Now it just made her tired. She remembered their honeymoon in Spain, how they'd laughed until they cried at a bull who'd chased a matador's cape straight into a restaurant patio. The chaos of it, the unexpected joy of the world going off-script. They used to be like that—wild, improbable, alive.

Now they were here, in a restaurant that cost more than their first car, eating organic spinach because her doctor said her vitamin D levels were catastrophically low. A metaphor, if she'd ever allowed herself to see one.

"I'm trying to build a future for us," David said, his voice rising slightly. Two couples at nearby tables glanced over.

"Are you?" She reached across the table and gently placed her hand over his, stilling his fingers against the phone screen. "Or are you just avoiding the present?"

His phone buzzed against her palm. He flinched. She pulled her hand back.

"You know what I'm deficient in?" she asked, standing up. "It's not vitamin D."

He just stared at her, his phone lighting up again with a notification.

Maya left without paying her half. She'd never done that before—left, made a scene, refused to be the reasonable one. As she walked out into the cool night air, she realized she didn't want to be the person who ate spinach while her life happened somewhere else, some future that never seemed to arrive.

Her phone buzzed in her purse—David, probably. Or maybe it was a reminder to take her vitamins. She turned it off and kept walking toward a future that would be hers alone, surprising and terrified and unscripted as a bull in a restaurant, finally, wonderfully, off-script.