The Weight of Leaving

The terminal was too bright, everything washed in sterile fluorescence. Elena adjusted the brim of her father's fedora, the wool still carrying the faint scent of his pipe tobacco and cedar. She'd stolen it from his closet before the estate lawyers came, before the house became nothing more than a line item in a probate file.

Her iPhone vibrated against the plastic chair—Mark again. Forty-seven messages since yesterday. She'd muted him but the notifications still scrolled across her lock screen like desperate accusations. *You can't just disappear. We need to talk about the apartment.* The apartment. As if she could think about lease agreements and dividing books when her father was three days in the ground.

"Would you look at that?" The woman next to her pointed toward the security checkpoint where a TSA agent was confiscating a child's plush bear from a weeping mother's arms. Something about prohibited items. The child's wail cut through the ambient airport noise, sharp and terrible. The bear—a grinning, button-eyed thing—was dropped into a bin of forbidden objects.

Elena turned away, her stomach twisting. She'd left her own childhood bear behind when she moved in with Mark three years ago. A brown thing named Barnaby, its left eye missing from when her brother had thrown it against the wall in a teenage rage. Mark had said it was childish, that they were building a life together, not living in a nursery. So she'd boxed it, donated it. Now she wondered where Barnaby had ended up. Whether some other child was holding him, or whether he'd been discarded like so much else.

The boarding announcement crackled overhead. Her flight was delayed. She had two more hours in this nowhere place, between cities, between lives.

She reached into her bag and found the orange she'd grabbed from her father's kitchen counter—the last thing remaining in a house that had been systematically emptied of his presence. Her fingers tore into the peel, citrus scent blooming sharp and real against the stale airport air. Something about the color of it, that impossible vibrant orange, felt like an act of defiance against the gray

Another vibration. Mark: *I'm coming to the airport.*

Elena typed back three words: *Please don't come.* Then she powered off the phone, placed the fedora on her head, and waited to board a plane that would take her anywhere but here.