One rainy Tuesday evening in May, Maya came home from the community center to find Taylor in the kitchen speaking too briskly to someone on speakerphone. His company’s CFO, judging by the tone. Papers were spread across the island. His attention was split and strained. Maya, exhausted from a day of family intake assessments and a child welfare hearing that had run long, went to the fridge for water and found a white bakery box on the bottom shelf.
She stared at it.
Taylor noticed her looking and covered the phone. “It’s for a client meeting tomorrow.”
She set the water down. “You brought cake into the house.”
“It’s not cake. It’s… pastries.”
“Are you hearing yourself?”
The CFO’s voice crackled faintly from the speaker. Taylor muted the line fully. “It’s one box in a refrigerator.”
“In a week where I’ve been trying not to rip my own skin off every time I walk past a bakery.”
He blinked, then glanced at the box, then back at her. “I didn’t think.”
“No,” she said. “You didn’t.”
The weariness of the day was already inside her. This tipped it over. “You say we’re doing this together, but you still get to step in and out of it whenever it suits you. You still get to have a normal appetite, normal body, normal distance.”
His expression sharpened. “That is not fair.”
“Neither is collapsing in an entryway because your heart can’t keep up.”
The words hung there, vicious and truer than she meant them. Taylor flinched as if she had slapped him.
He said, very quietly, “No. It isn’t.”
Maya hated herself immediately. She also hated that he made it harder to stay protected because he did not retaliate the way arrogant men usually did.
He took the box out of the fridge, walked to the trash compactor, and dropped it in without another word. Then he returned to the island, unmuted the call, and said to his CFO in a voice as cold as glass, “Reschedule tomorrow’s meeting. I’m no longer hosting.”
