What the Cat Witnessed

Marcus stood in their kitchen at 6 AM, squeezing an orange until his knuckles turned white. The juice ran down his wrist, sticky and bright against his pale skin. He watched Elena sleep through the doorway, her breathing rhythmic and infuriatingly peaceful. Three years of marriage, and he'd learned to measure his betrayals in breakfast preparations.

"You're leaving," she said from the doorway. She wasn't sleeping anymore.

The cat — a haughty Siamese they'd rescued together, before everything curdled — wound between Marcus's legs, purring as if it couldn't taste the acrid bitterness in the air. "I was going to tell you."

"When? After I made coffee? After I ate that papaya you bought because you know it's my favorite?" Elena's voice cracked, years of swallowed disappointment finally surfacing. "Or were you going to let me find out like Sarah did, through the office grapevine?"

Marcus's silence was answer enough.

He thought about the spinach stuck between his teeth at last night's gala, how Elena had reached up to clean it from his smile with such tenderness, even as she must have known. That tendleness now felt like the most devastating form of contempt.

"She's twenty-four," Elena said quietly. "I saw her LinkedIn. She orders her spinach smoothies with extra protein powder and calls herself disruptive."

"Elena—"

"Does she know about us? About how you proposed in that orange grove in Valencia?" She wasn't crying. That was somehow worse. "Does she know you still sleep on your left side because I'm deaf in my right ear and you want to hear if I need anything?"

The cat jumped onto the counter and began lapping at Marcus's orange juice, its rough pink tonguelapping at the spilled sweetness. Neither of them stopped it.

"I'm staying with my mother," Elena said, already turning away. "Don't follow me. Let the cat keep you company tonight — god knows someone should have warned you what happens when you stop feeding the thing that loves you."