The Last Piece of Cake

"How can you do that? How can you go and do that? I don't- I can't." Daphne is sputtering now, apoplectic with rage and despair. "I mean, really. Really!?! You ate the last piece of my cake. My BIRTHDAY cake. MINE. I saved that piece specifically- you ate the corner piece with my name written on it, how could you possibly think that was meant for YOU?" Daphne collapses onto the stool at the island, exhausted. She's spent every last ounce of her energy and the full weight of the loss is hitting her hard. She has been dreaming about this cake all day. All week. She had portioned it out so that come Friday she could indulge, finally, in the best part of the entire last year. A custom four tiered coconut banana dark chocolate layer cake with a hint of mocha and edible flowers. Edible flowers, for crying out loud! Pink and purple and yellow, her favourite colours. She had searched high and low for the right bakery to make it exactly the way she envisioned it in her head. It's a Big Deal. Sure, to everyone else it's just a cake. Marc is baffled and frankly rather turned off by the severity of Daph's meltdown and the accusatory tone in her voice. He was hungry, so what, he had the last piece of cake. It's been in the fridge for two days; he figured might as well eat it before it goes off. It's too good to compost, waste not want not, all that stuff. Had he known this would be the beginning of the end he would have just grabbed another beer. Suddenly they're in divorce territory over dessert. What the hell. Christ, man, it's a freakin piece of cake, I'll get you a new one. But that sets her off again on another roiling tangent, complaining that the cake can't be replaced, it's a one-off; she doesn't WANT an entire cake, just that last piece, her piece, the one part she got to save after everyone else mowed their way through it at dinner on Wednesday. "Delayed gratification is grossly misunderstood here," Daph says. "You took something of mine that I will never be able to get back and now I'm wanting and it hurts and I'm angry. You need to hear that." Marc looks at this woman sitting across from him in the middle of their brand new renovated kitchen, a woman he's spent the best part of  4 years with and he thinks, who the hell are you? It was a piece of cake. Instead, he swallows, tilts his head toward the floor then back to meet her eyes. "I'm sorry". "There," she says. "There. Thank you. Thank you for that." Marc sighs, picks up his bag and leads to the door. "Where are you going?" He stops short of the entrance. "I'm off to the gym. Back in an hour or two." And with that, he steps onto the front porch, heads down the driveway, gets in his car and never comes back.

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