What She Left Behind

Elena stood in the produce section, her thumb hovering over the screen of her iPhone. David's text had come through three hours ago: *Can we talk?* The notification still glowed there, demanding an answer she wasn't ready to give.

She dropped two bunches of spinach into her basket. They were supposed to be for the quiche she made every Sunday—their ritual. Six years of Sunday quiches, now reduced to this: organic spinach she'd cook and eat alone in their apartment that felt more like a museum of shared memories than a home.

Her phone buzzed again. *Please, El. I know you're seeing this.*

She moved to the tropical fruits, searching for papaya. It was David's favorite, something he'd discovered on that solo trip to Costa Rica last year. The trip where everything changed, though she hadn't realized it until the credit card statement arrived three months later, with hotel charges for two.

"The burden of proof," the lawyer had called it. But Elena had known before she ever hired anyone. She'd seen it in the way he stopped touching her, stopped looking at her across restaurant tables, stopped caring whether she ate breakfast.

She found the papaya, perfectly ripe. The skin yellow-orange like something burning, something dying. She remembered the night she'd asked him, straight out: *Is there someone else?* The way he'd looked at her—pity, relief, exhaustion all tangled together. *I think I've been lonely for a long time, El.*

Lonely. As if she hadn't been there, day after day, bearing the weight of his silences, his distance, his gradual unspooling from everything they'd built.

Her phone lit up with a call. David's name floated across the screen like a ghost.

Elena pressed decline. She dropped the papaya into her basket, next to the spinach, and walked toward the checkout. Sunday quiche was cancelled. Some traditions, she realized, deserved to die.