What We Leave Behind

The apartment was too quiet. Marcus stood in the doorway, the grocery bag heavy in his arms. On the counter, a bowl of spinach wilted beside a half-empty coffee mug — Elena's, with the hairline crack she'd never let him fix.

She was gone.

He found the note on the refrigerator, held in place by a magnet from their trip to Santa Fe three years ago. The baseball game was still playing on the TV he'd left on that morning, the announcer's voice echoing strangely in the empty room.

He'd meant to be better. After the doctor told him about the vitamin D deficiency, he'd promised to take the supplements, to spend more time outside, to be the man she fell in love with in college. Instead, he'd become someone who worked late and forgot anniversaries and left spinach to rot in the crisper drawer.

Their dog, Buster, whined from the bedroom. Marcus found him curled on Elena's pillow, the one that still smelled like her vanilla shampoo. The goldfish bowl on the nightstand cast wavering light on the walls, its solitary inhabitant swimming endless circles in cloudy water.

"She left you too," Marcus whispered to the fish, a joke that fell flat.

On the bedside table: the vitamin bottle he'd purchased two weeks ago and never opened. Next to it, her earrings, the expensive ones he'd bought for Valentine's Day, left behind like she couldn't be bothered to pack them.

He sat on the edge of the bed, listening to the baseball crowd roar at some play he'd never see. Outside, the city hummed with other people's lives, other people who maybe remembered to love each other before it was too late.

Buster licked his hand, and Marcus let himself cry for the first time in years. The spinach would rot. The vitamins would expire. The goldfish would probably die without her to feed it.

Tomorrow, he'd call her mother. Tomorrow, he'd figure out what to do with the lease. Tonight, he'd let himself be a man whose wife had finally stopped waiting for him to become someone worth staying for.