What We Harvest

The papaya sat on the counter between us, its mottled skin ripening faster than our marriage. Marcus had bought it on a whim during his last business trip to Miami—a city where, I later learned, he'd also acquired a taste for someone named Sofia.

'I thought you liked exotic fruit,' he said, defensive as always. His tie was loosened, that expensive silk orange one I'd given him three Christmases ago. Now it looked like a noose.

'I like honesty,' I replied, chopping spinach with unnecessary force. 'That's the real exotic commodity around here.'

We were supposed to be having a nice dinner. Reconnecting. Instead, we were conducting an autopsy of our seven years together over vegetables that would probably wilt before we reached dessert.

'You're being dramatic.' He leaned against the counter, arms crossed—that bullish stance he used in boardrooms, assuming posture could substitute for character. 'It was a lapse. It meant nothing.'

I stopped chopping. 'A lapse that lasted three months. A nothing that cost five thousand dollars in hotel charges.' I met his eyes. 'You know what you are, Marcus? You think you're this straightforward, honest guy. But you're a fox.' He started to interrupt, but I continued. 'Not the clever kind. The scavenger kind. The one that creeps in under fences and takes what isn't his because he's too cowardly to hunt anything real.'

The papaya seemed to watch us, its seeds like small accusing eyes.

'I'm going to Julia's,' I said, wiping my hands on a towel. 'When I come back, I want your key on the counter.'

'This is my house too,' he said, but his voice cracked.

'Not anymore.' I opened the drawer where we kept our grocery receipts—another thing I'd tracked, another bank statement I'd memorized. 'Besides, you have hotels now.'

I left him standing there in our kitchen, surrounded by the fruits of his deception. The spinach was still on the cutting board, half-chopped, like the life we'd almost built together before he decided to take what wasn't his.