Bear Market at the Barton

Elena swirled the spinach leaf in her vinaigrette, watching it bleed into the vinegar like a slow bruise. The rooftop pool of the Barton Hotel glittered below them—her colleagues half-drunk, bodies glistening, swimming through the chlorinated water like sharks in a too-small tank. She was forty-two, and this was what her life had become: open bar, open secrets, everybody waiting to see who'd drown first.

"You're not drinking," said Miller, sliding onto the stool beside her. He was a bear of a man—massive shoulders, graying beard, eyes that had seen too many quarters close in the red. Her boss. Her ex-lover. The two worst decisions she'd made in the last decade, wrapped in one disastrous package.

"I'm bearing witness," she said, pushing the spinach around her plate. "That's what you pay me for, isn't it? To watch things fall apart and write it up in the quarterly report?"

He laughed, the sound rough as gravel. "That's not why I pay you, El."

"No?" She turned to face him, really looked at him for the first time in months. The lines around his eyes had deepened. He was tired. They were all tired, swimming upstream against a current that had been against them since 2008.

Miller leaned closer, his breath smelling of expensive scotch. "There's going to be a restructuring. Next week. You should—"

"Save it." She stood up, knees trembling slightly. "I've been swimming in your toxic water for six years, Miller. I think I'd rather drown somewhere else."

Below them, someone screamed with laughter, cutting through the humidity like glass. Elena didn't look down. She walked toward the elevator, leaving her half-eaten spinach, leaving Miller, leaving the whole glittering, rotting mess of it behind.

The elevator doors closed. For the first time in years, she could breathe.