After the Lightning

Elara sat in the parking garage, her iPhone at 2%, watching Richard's office window on the 42nd floor. The storm outside had been raging for hours, and she knew—she just knew—he was with HER. The woman from the Christmas party. The one whose laugh sounded like breaking glass.

She needed the cable. Richard had taken their only Lightning cable to the hotel that weekend—the "business trip" weekend—and never brought it back. Too petty to mention, too heavy to ignore. Now her lifeline was dying, pixel by pixel, along with her marriage.

Thunder rattled the Honda's windows. Lightning fractured the sky, illuminating the rain-slicked pavement like veins on marble. In that flash, she saw herself: thirty-four, sitting in a car she hated, waiting for confirmation of what she'd felt for months. The distance between them wasn't physical anymore—it was the silence at dinner, the phone face-down on the nightstand, the way he'd started leaving the room to take calls.

Her thumb hovered over HIS name. One call, and this limbo would end. But endings were permanent.

The iPhone flickered. One percent.

Then she saw it—Richard's figure at the window, looking down at the parking garage. Another flash of lightning, and this time she wasn't alone in the car. Someone was standing beside her, tapping on the glass.

It was Richard.

He'd been in the backseat the whole time, sleeping off a migraine while she sat out here, constructing tragedies in the dark. Her phone died at the same moment his key clicked in the lock. Some storms never break—the ones inside your head.