What We Carry

The funeral reception blurred around Maya—relatives she barely recognized, platters of food, the air thick with performed grief. She stood near the buffet, absently chewing on a spinach tart that tasted of nothing. Something stuck in her teeth. She dug for it with her tongue, a private indignity while her mother's sister sobbed into a lace handkerchief nearby.

Through the sliding doors, she saw him—Elias—standing alone in the backyard. He wore his father's hat, that same crushed fedora that had smelled of tobacco and rain. Maya felt it then, the weight she'd been carrying since Ethan's funeral three years ago. How long could they bear it? The silence between them had grown comfortable, like a well-worn sweater, but suddenly it suffocated.

She found herself running—not away, but toward him. Her heels sank into the grass. When she reached his side, neither spoke. Below them, in the small garden pond, a single goldfish darted between lily pads, flashes of orange in murky water.

"Remember," Elias said, "when we bought that fish for Josh?"

"He named it Captain," she said. "Lived seven years."

"Died the same week as Ethan."

The truth rose in her throat, sudden and sharp. She had been running from this moment since it happened—from the hospital corridor, from the casket, from the bed where they slept like strangers on opposite shores.

"I don't want to do this anymore," she said.

Elias turned. His eyes, the same soft brown as Josh's, held hers. "The funeral?"

"The pretending. That we're okay. That we survived."

He reached for her hand, his fingers warm against her cold skin. The goldfish broke the surface,瞬间 gone.

"We didn't survive," he said. "We're still here anyway."

The spinach finally dislodged from her tooth. She swallowed. For the first time in three years, the silence between them felt not like an absence but like a question—answered, finally, by the warmth of his hand in hers.