She was scheduled to stay late tonight for line-by-line grammar edits of the school newspaper. She didn’t like grammar but respected it, as though it were a gruff uncle who’d fought in the war and didn’t smile but showed up every holiday with a casserole. Grammar could be counted on for casserole. Perhaps green bean-based, something you’d feel obligated to spoon onto your plate at the gathering, and Gruff Uncle would nod, all is in order, all is in order.

Her eyes veered to the window. Dead leaves clung to branches on a maple tree.  An evergreen stood as narrow and tall as it could, as though trying not to be noticed. She didn’t want to look at the greyish-white house with its black shutters and drab concrete stairs. She wanted to look at its green door. It was a green of mythic proportions, inspiring visions of dragons’ scales or mermaid tails. That a door that green could exist amidst the tramped-on slush January held the promise of hope in its keyhole.

The fact was, the girl was out of spinach, and had cursed herself this morning for neglecting to purchase some over the weekend. Now, the week was off to a running start and she was choking on its dust because there would be no healthy breakfast tomorrow without it, and she really should have a healthy breakfast in light of the unfortunate-yet-delicious cupcake frenzy last week.

She’d been faithfully blending spinach smoothies in the morning for months now, but she wouldn’t want to stop on the way home in the 9pm dark, not in the icy cold, not a detour from the most efficient route to her bed from which she must rise again bleary-eyed in too-few hours.

She’d mentioned this spinach conundrum to her fiancée in the morning when he mentioned he needed to get yogurt, and thought of it again in the evening when he’d brought her hot cocoa in the newspaper room. They’d sat and dreamed up Valentine’s Day plans for this year as she took a break from the Gruff Uncle Grammar’s grim sighs.

He’d worn the hat that she despised, with its blue braids drooping on either side, begging her to rent them asunder. But he’d brought her hot cocoa, and its sweetness must quell her fantasies of hat-sabotage.

She suggested, “What if you and I each surprise each other with a sweet ingredient and then we make up a dessert recipe that uses both?”

They both sipped on their respective hot cocoas and she thought of Sedona, Arizona two Christmases ago where they’d learned of an Indian wedding tradition of having the bride and groom drink from different sides of a two-spouted vase and how even though they were drinking from different cups, the same cocoa warmed them up. When he tasted it, did the cocoa taste the same as it did to her? Were two people ever able to share an experience? She wanted to point to the green door, “Do you see it? Do you see it?”

But she didn’t.

He approved of the mystery dessert plan and left her to dutifully follow grammar’s orders.

The night drifted on and the snow and the dark blotted out the green door when she exited the building she’d entered more than thirteen hours earlier.

If it wasn’t so icy, she thought, she wouldn’t be so angry about having to stop for spinach. Or maybe if it wasn’t spinach, the ugly child of the Gruff Uncle who knew what was best, who never let you forget it—the bossy cousin who you were forced to play with, who always decided what game to play and that you were going to be the sidekick. That was the problem: spinach made one feel like a sidekick.

In light of its perfection, you were inferior. Unhealthy. Riddled with excess and waste unlike the spare and majestic green-leafed wonder with nature stamped in every chlorophyll-ed vein.

If only she hadn’t needed to glovelessly scrape ice from her windows while the moisture pervaded her thin-soled boots. She thought, would rather he had scraped the windows than brought hot cocoa. She was ungrateful. She was petty. She was undeserving of hot cocoa. She thought of a friend’s sister who, when she’d had two men courting her and she’d come down with a cold, one brought her soup and one flowers, and the question to be answered was: “Which do you want for the rest of your life?” The sister had married the soup. They had three girls and one round-faced boy now.

She finished the ice scraping and would’ve definitely married the soup, too.

She drove home carefully, not wanting to deviate from the black tracks of previous tires on the snow and ice-encrusted streets. No way was she veering from the route home. The spinach would have to wait. She felt its disapproving crossed arms, its sanctimonious close-eyed shake of the head from the grocery store two blocks away.

When she arrived home, she peeled off her wet boots and opened the door of the refrigerator to contemplate next morning’s breakfast.

And there it was, green and glorious.

The beautiful man had bought her spinach.

She closed the door and knew the fairytale secret locked in its keyhole. Her whole being whirled with dizzy giddiness enough to stay up all night and start their once upon a time every time to live forever in the light of the moon that illuminated each snowflake that was different, like how this moment was different from each of their five years together and would be different from all the years to come, and it was that the spinach affirmed something she didn’t realize needed affirming. She knew. She knew. This was the beautiful man she would marry.