What We Carry

Marcus stood in the produce aisle, holding a papaya like it might break if he squeezed too hard. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead, the same aggressive brightness as the hospital where they'd spent three days waiting for his mother to die. He should have been at work. The merger deadline was tomorrow, but his partner Jenna had texted: *We need to talk.*

He found her at their apartment, sitting on the balcony with a bowl of spinach she'd evidently forgotten to eat. The apartment felt too large now, filled with the furniture they'd chosen together when optimism was cheap.

"I saw him," Jenna said. Her voice sounded like it had been worn down by sandpaper. "At the gallery. He was looking at that photograph he took of us in Prague. Remember?"

Marcus nodded. Prague, before the miscarriage, before the silence grew so thick between them they could barely breathe through it. Before she reconnected with Liam—the ex who still haunted her like a recurring dream she couldn't wake from.

"He invited me to dinner. His wife is out of town."

The goldfish in the corner tank swam its endless loop, orange flash against the glass, mouth opening and closing in that perpetually surprised expression. They'd bought it on impulse the week after the funeral. Something alive that required so little.

"And what did you say?" Marcus asked, though he already knew.

"I said I'd think about it."

He set the papaya on the counter. It sat there, innocently exotic, like a joke about a life they'd never had. The wilting spinach smelled faintly of earth and decay.

"You have to bear this," Marcus said quietly. "Whatever you're feeling, you have to actually feel it. Not run toward the first person who makes you feel something else."

"Is that what you're doing?" she shot back. "Because you haven't felt anything in six months. You work, you come home, you feed the fish. You're not grieving with me, Marcus. You're waiting for me to stop grieving so we can pretend to be fine again."

The truth of it landed like a physical blow. She reached across the table, her hand covering his. "I still love you. But I don't know if I remember how to be us anymore."

They ate dinner in silence—papaya and spinach, paired foods that shouldn't work but somehow did. The goldfish watched them swim through the currents of everything they couldn't say.