After the Flash

Margot traced the lifeline on her left palm, the crease deepening as she gripped her husband's cold hand. The hospital room hummed with machines measuring vital signs that had been failing for days. Outside, a summer storm was building.

"Remember Cancún?" she whispered, though David couldn't hear her. The palm trees had swayed over their resort pool, that artificial blue lagoon where they'd floated on inflatable rafts, drunk on rum punch and the careless optimism of thirty-somethings who assumed they had forever. He'd splashed her, and she'd retaliated, and they'd kissed with the salt of chlorinated water on their lips.

Lightning cracked the sky outside, a violent fracture of white that illuminated the waxen hollow of David's cheeks. Margot squeezed his hand, remembering how he used to wake her before thunderstorms, wrap his arms around her and promise that lightning never strikes the same place twice. He'd been wrong about that. The same loss could find you over and over.

"I signed the papers," she said. "The pool house. The one we talked about." David had wanted to put in a swimming pool before the cancer diagnosis, back when they were still making five-year plans. Now she'd sold the house where those plans lived, pooling the proceeds into a trust for their daughter's education. It felt like surrender, this dismantling of a life they'd built together.

Another flash of lightning, and for a second, she saw David as he was—laughing, alive, the man who had held her hand through three miscarriages and her mother's slow decline. Then the room darkened again, and he was just a body failing its final engagement.

The storm broke. Rain lashed against the window, and Margot closed her eyes. She pressed her palm against his, skin against cooling skin, and remembered how he'd once told her that grief was like lightning—you couldn't predict where it would strike, but you could survive it if you stopped trying to control where it landed.

She would survive this. The pools of sorrow would eventually recede, leaving behind new landscapes she couldn't yet imagine. But first, she had to let go.

The monitor's steady rhythm faltered, then straightened into a single continuous tone. Margot didn't move. She simply held his hand as the storm raged outside, waiting for the thunder to catch up to the flash.