Bobbing for Surface

Mara pushed off the wall, the water swallowing her whole in that delicious silence she'd come to crave. Six a.m., the indoor pool hers alone except for the echoes of her own strokes. Swimming had become her morning liturgy—lap after lap, counting breaths instead of the hours until the next panic attack about her dissolving marriage, her stagnant career, the terrifying realization that forty was approaching like a freight train.

She surfaced halfway down lane three, gasping, and there it was: a cat sitting primly on the deck, orange tail curled around its paws, watching her with what looked unnervingly like judgment.

"You again," she whispered, treading water.

The cat had appeared three mornings ago—the same day Elena had stopped returning her texts. Elena, her oldest friend, the person who'd held her hair back during her twenties, who'd sat beside her at her mother's funeral, who'd known her longer than she'd known herself. Until Mara had crossed a line she hadn't known existed, drunkenly confessing feelings that had been simmering for years, poisoning the comfortable space between them with something hungry and uninvited.

Now Elena was gone, and this cat—Elena's cat, she was almost certain—was haunting her pool sessions.

Mara dragged herself from the water, dripping and shivering in the air-conditioned chill. The cat didn't flee. It approached, weaving between her ankles, purring like a small engine.

"Did she send you?" Mara asked, voice cracking. "Or are you just lost like the rest of us?"

The cat's collar glinted silver in the fluorescent light. She crouched, fingers trembling, and read the small tag: *Luna*. Elena's Luna.

"You're not supposed to be here," she said, but she scooped the cat up anyway, burying her face in soft fur that smelled of someone else's home. For the first time in weeks, she cried—really cried—letting the pool water and the grief and the terrible, lonely uncertainty of adulthood spill out of her, while the cat purred against her chest, forgiving her for everything she couldn't take back.