The Things We Don't Say

The spinach lay wilted on Elena's plate, a confession she couldn't bring herself to make. Three months of marriage counseling, and here they were, another Thursday evening pretending that cooking dinner together could fix what seven years had slowly dismantled.

"You're staring again," Marcos said, not looking up from his papaya, its flesh glistening under the halogen light like something already beginning to rot. He had that look—the one that said he was calculating escape routes, measuring the distance between them.

"I'm not staring. I'm waiting."

"For what?"

"The truth."

The air between them thickened. Marcos set down his fork. His phone had been buzzing all evening—notifications from his padel league, the Thursday night matches Elena had stopped attending months ago when she'd realized he wasn't going to games. He was going to see Sophie, the woman from his accounting firm whose laugh he described as 'refreshing.'

"The padel tournament starts tomorrow," he said instead. "I should probably get some sleep."

"Swimming through your life like you're underwater," she said, the words leaving her before she could stop them. "That's what you do. You learned it from your mother—that trick of holding your breath until everyone else drowns first."

He stood up, chair scraping against the floor. "Jesus, Elena. We agreed to work on the positivity exercises. Dr. Evans said—"

"Dr. Evans doesn't know that you haven't touched me in four months. Dr. Evans doesn't know you cancelled our anniversary dinner for a 'client emergency' that was actually Sophie's birthday."

The silence stretched, painful and intimate. Outside, a car passed, its headlights sweeping across their untouched dinner—the spinach she'd sautéed with garlic and regret, the papaya she'd selected because it was his favorite, or used to be.

"I thought we were past this," he said quietly.

"We're not past anything. We're drowning in it."

He reached for his keys.

"Where are you going?"

"Out."

"To play padel? At ten o'clock at night?"

He didn't answer. The door clicked shut behind him.

Elena sat with the wilted spinach and the slowly oxidizing papaya, realizing she had finally stopped waiting for him to choose her. Tomorrow she would call the realtor. Tomorrow she would make herself something else. Tonight, she simply cleared the table, the sound of dishes against ceramic loud in the empty apartment.