The Wellness of Regret

Marcus sat on his therapist's couch, his hands trembling around an orange he'd brought from home — a ritual she'd suggested for grounding anxiety. At forty-seven, he'd somehow become the kind of man who carried citrus for emotional regulation.

"You need to reconnect," Dr. Chen had said. "With yourself, with others. Isolation is corrosive."

So here he was, at a baseball game with Sarah, his oldest friend, though they hadn't spoken properly in three years. Not since the incident at her wedding, when he'd made that toast about how love is just mutual delusion, and the room had gone so quiet he could hear ice melting in their champagne flutes.

Now Sarah sat beside him, married and glowing with that terrifying wellness of someone who'd discovered that expensive papaya enzymes could fix what therapy couldn't. She'd been lecturing him about gut health for twenty minutes.

"It's not just food, Marcus. It's medicine. This papaya farm in Costa Rica — they literally fly people in for vitamin IV drips. You should come."

He watched the batter swing and miss. The crowd groaned. He remembered coming here with her father, back when Mr. Henderson was still alive and baseball was just something you did on Sundays, not something you analyzed for probability metrics.

"I had a scare," Marcus said suddenly.

Sarah turned. The sunscreen she'd applied earlier made her face look artificially young, like she'd been filtered. "What kind of scare?"

"Doctors found something. On my lung." He peeled the orange, his fingers stained with juice. "Probably nothing. But you know how it is — you start thinking about everything you never said, everyone you pushed away because you were too busy being right about everything."

The sun was setting, turning the field orange-gold. For a moment, they were just kids again, eating oranges from her father's grocery store, sticky and happy and completely unaware that they'd grow into people who needed reasons to be in the same room.

"The papaya place," Sarah said quietly. "I'll send you the link."

"Sarah."

"What?"

"I missed you."

She didn't say anything. Just reached over and took a piece of his orange, and they watched the game in silence while somewhere beneath them, the city continued its business of breaking and healing hearts, entirely indifferent to them both.