What Remains Unsaid

The spinach clung to Marcus's front tooth like a dark secret, and Maya watched it throughout the appetizer. She'd stopped pointing these things out years ago—somewhere between the mortgage approval and his mother's funeral, she'd lost the language for small intimacies.

The restaurant's walls were painted a bruised orange, the color of regrettable sunsets. Marcus was talking about the promotion, his hands animating each clause, but Maya's attention had drifted to the woman two tables over. She was laughing, head thrown back, hair wild and unapologetic—everything Maya used to be before she learned to be the kind of wife who didn't interrupt.

"You're not listening," Marcus said suddenly.

"I am." She wasn't. She was thinking about the cable bill, unpaid for three months, how it sat between them like another kind of debt they couldn't discuss. How the dangling cord from the television had become the only thing that still connected them, physically, in any real way.

"Maya."

She looked at him then—really looked—at the spinach, at the exhaustion etched around his eyes, at the hands that used to hold hers but now only held forks and steering wheels.

"I don't think we know how to be married anymore," she said. The words hung in the orange-tinted air, terrible and liberating.

Marcus stopped chewing. The spinach was still there.

"I was going to tell you about the transfer," he said quietly. "Seattle. They want me there by fall."

Seattle. Where she'd always wanted to live, where she'd imagined them starting over before life became something that happened to them, not something they made.

"And you were just... going to go?"

"I thought maybe you'd come with me. If there was anything left worth saving."

Maya pressed her palm flat against the table, feeling the heartbeat she'd thought had disappeared entirely. Somewhere beneath the spinach and the cable bill and the years of unsaid things, something was still alive.

"There is," she said. "But we have to learn how to speak to each other again. Starting with the spinach."

Marcus laughed, surprised, and wiped it away. For the first time in years, the orange light didn't feel like sunset at all.