Water Damage

The iPhone lay in the bathroom sink, surrounded by shattered glass and something green. Spinach, David realized, recognizing the flecks stuck to the cracked screen. Maya must have been cooking when she got the call. The call that made her drop everything—literally.

He should be running. That's what his therapist said. Put one foot in front of the other, move forward, keep breathing. But David hadn't run since the night she left, unless you counted running back to the bottle every evening.

Water dripped from the faucet, a steady rhythm that matched the ache in his chest. Maya had dropped her phone in the sink—or maybe thrown it. He imagined her hands shaking as she reached for him, for support, for something to hold onto while their world collapsed around them. Instead, she'd found a pan of spinach sizzling on the stove and a phone that wouldn't stop ringing with hospital numbers.

'Pancreatic cancer. Stage four.' That's what the voicemail said, when he finally found the courage to check her messages three days after she vanished. She'd gone to her mother's, to the house by the ocean where they'd spent summers as children. Salt water and old grief.

David pressed the iPhone's power button. Nothing. The screen remained black, like the future they'd planned together. The house they'd never furnish. The children they'd never name.

He turned on the water, letting it run over his hands, watching it swirl down the drain. Maya always said spinach was too much work for too little reward. Too many leaves to clean, too much water to extract, too much shrinking in the pan. Like them, maybe. Like every choice they'd made thinking there was time.

There would be time for running later. Time to chase the diagnosis, time to fight, time to lose her by inches instead of all at once. Tonight, David stood at the sink and let the water carry away the spinach stains on his wife's phone, the only evidence she'd ever really existed here at all.