The Things We Keep

Maya sat at her desk at 7:43 PM, the office mostly empty except for the hum of servers and her own breathing. She peeled an orange, the citrus scent cutting through the stale air of thirty open browser tabs and lukewarm coffee. Her iPhone buzzed—him again. Three missed calls since lunch.

She shouldn't answer. She knew she shouldn't answer. But her fingers moved anyway, muscle memory from three years of being someone's person.

"I left my vitamins," he said when she picked up. "Did you see them?"

"I threw them out, Nathan."

Silence. Then, "Those were expensive. The B-complex? The magnesium?"

"The bottles are in the trash. The hair ties you left are in the trash. The hoodie is in the trash."

"Maya, come on. Can we just—"

"You moved out two weeks ago. Why are you still calling about supplements?"

She watched the orange segments in her hand. Juice pooled in her palm, sticky and bright against skin that felt too dry, too exposed. She'd stopped using his moisturizer when he left. Her hair had lost its usual sheen. Everything felt smaller without him, even though she'd wanted this—had pushed for this space, this distance, this freedom that now felt terrifyingly vast.

"I miss you," he said. "I'm sorry about the messaging thing. I was stupid. I was just..."

"You were just what?"

"Insecure. I know. I know now."

She stared at the water bottle on her desk. Condensation weeping down the sides. She'd cried over him four times yesterday. Five times the day before. The cycle was exhausting, this pendulum between righteous anger and gutting loss.

"I don't trust you anymore," she said. "I don't know who you are."

"I'm still me. The guy who—"

"The guy who created a fake Instagram account to see if I'd DM someone else? That guy?"

He sighed. The sound crackled through the line like static. "I was going to tell you. I was trying to find the right time."

"There is no right time to admit you're catfishing your girlfriend to test her loyalty, Nathan."

Another silence. Longer this time. Outside, rain began to streak the windows, turning the city into blurred watercolors.

"Can I come get them?" he asked finally. "The vitamins. They cost like eighty dollars."

Maya looked at the orange in her hand, at the perfect sphere of fruit she'd painstakingly peeled. At the empty chair across from her desk where he used to sit when he waited for her to finish work. At the life they'd built that now felt like a house she couldn't stop walking through, touching the walls, wondering if she'd ever stop measuring everything against what she'd lost.

"No," she said. "You can't."

She hung up before he could respond. Then she turned off her phone, dropped it in her bag, and ate the orange one segment at a time, letting the juice run down her chin, letting herself be messy and human and alone. The office was dark now. Just her and the hum of servers and the taste of something sweet and bright and uncomplicated, the first thing she'd enjoyed in weeks that didn't taste like regret.