What Remains in the Bowl

The dog—Barnaby, because David always had a weakness for pretentious names—stared at me from across the kitchen table. His brown eyes held an accusation I couldn't escape. Three weeks after the funeral and still I couldn't bring myself to feed him properly.

I pushed the bowl of wilted spinach toward him. David's favorite. I'd spent twenty years choking down the bitter leaves because he believed in their heart-healthy properties, believed in so many things that turned out to be wrong.

"You're projecting," I told the dog. Barnaby thumped his tail once, against the chair leg, and went back to watching me.

The cable box flickered with some infomercial at 3 AM—insomnia had become my new normal. I'd stopped paying for premium channels after the lawyers drained everything, but the basic package still worked. Something about digital signals lingering even after you've stopped paying for them, like grief after love.

My phone buzzed. A notification from LinkedIn: David's former colleague, now promoted to his position. The corporate restructure had been announced the day before he died. Stress-induced heart attack, the coroner said. I'd found the emails about the demotion on his laptop afterwards. He'd never told me.

I picked up a handful of raw spinach from the bowl and chewed. The bitterness hit my tongue—sharp, alive, honest. I'd hated this vegetable for two decades. I'd cooked it because I loved him, because love is compromise and silence and swallowing things you can't stomach.

Barnaby whined, finally eating from his bowl.

"We're both free," I whispered to the empty kitchen. "He never loved us. He loved the idea of us—of the wife who cooked heart-healthy meals and the dog that made him look responsible. The dog he forgot to walk. The wife he forgot to tell about losing his job."

The cable news switched to a story about layoffs in the tech sector. I turned off the TV and sat in the dark with the dog and the spinach, feeling something like hope for the first time in years.