What We Keep in Our Pockets

The spinach was stuck between his front teeth, and Elena hadn't told him. Forty minutes into their anniversary dinner, and she was still watching him laugh, smile at the waiter, lean across the table with that earnest expression she'd fallen for seven years ago, all while a green fragment decayed in plain sight.

She smoothed her napkin, feeling her phone buzz in her pocket. Her iPhone had been vibrating all evening—work emails, probably, or maybe her mother wanting to know if they'd finally set a date for the wedding they kept postponing. She ignored it, the way she'd been ignoring everything that mattered lately.

"You okay?" Marcus asked, reaching across to take her hand. His palm was warm, familiar, mapped with the tiny scars from his old construction job. The same hand that had held hers through her father's funeral, through three job changes, through the miscarriage they never talked about anymore.

"Fine," she said. "Just... thinking."

"About what?"

"About that goldfish we won at the fair," she said, surprising herself. "The one that died after three days because you overfed it."

Marcus laughed. "God, I was an idiot. I just wanted it to be happy."

"You wanted it to love you," she said quietly. "You thought food was the same thing as care."

The silence stretched between them, thin and dangerous. Elena's phone buzzed again, and this time she pulled it out. Not work emails. Not her mother.

Messages from someone named David, sent while Marcus was in the bathroom: *I can't stop thinking about last night.*

Marcus saw the screen. His face didn't change—no anger, no surprise—but his hand pulled back from hers.

"I didn't want you to find out like this," she whispered.

"The spinach," he said, touching his teeth. "You saw it forty minutes ago."

"What?"

"The spinach. You noticed, but you didn't tell me. You haven't been able to look me in the eye all night, but you still couldn't be honest about something that small." He stood up, dropping some cash on the table. "I think we're done here."

Elena watched him walk out, her phone still lighting up with messages from a man she barely knew, while the waiter approached with their complimentary anniversary dessert, two spoons, a candle flickering between them.