What Remains

Her hair fell out in clumps that spring. Thomas would gather it from the pillow while she slept, wrapping each handful in tissue paper like something precious, not evidence of radiation's systematic dismantling. "You're brave," he'd say, his voice cracking. "Brave people don't lose their fucking hair," she'd snap, then cry into his chest because he stayed anyway.

Six months later, the scans were clean. The hair grew back curlier, darker. Thomas said he liked it better. She didn't believe him but kept him anyway.

Now they sat on the floor of their new apartment—smaller, cheaper, necessary after the medical bills—and fought about whose turn it was to walk the dog. Wellington, the bulldog they'd adopted during treatment because the shelter swore he was "good for emotional support," currently snored loudly on the couch, oblivious to their collapsing marriage.

"I walked him yesterday," Thomas said, opening an orange with deliberate slowness. "You were at chemo."

"That was three months ago."

"It feels like yesterday." He punctured the peel with his thumb. Citrus scent filled the silence between them. "Everything feels like yesterday."

She'd stopped eating toward the end of treatment. Nothing tasted right except one thing: raw spinach leaves, eaten straight from the bag while watching terrible television at 3 AM. Thomas had caught her once, standing over the sink with a fistful of greens, and instead of asking why, he'd simply stood beside her and eaten some too.

Now she watched him peel the orange, segment by segment, and remembered that night in the hospital when the doctor said "remission" and Thomas had fainted dead away. She'd laughed then, a hysterical sound that echoed down the hallway, because even at death's door, even with everything burning, he'd managed to make survival feel like the punchline.

"I don't want this anymore," she said, not sure what she meant—the apartment, the dog, him, or the life that kept going when everything had been supposed to stop.

Thomas stopped peeling. Wellington snored on.

"I know," he said. "Me neither."

They sat there as the sun set, the orange half-peeled between them, and she thought about how you could survive something that should have killed you, only to realize you weren't sure you wanted to.

She reached for the orange. Her hand trembled. His didn't.

"We'll walk Wellington together," she said.

He nodded. They did.