Chlorine and Regret

The motel pool shimmered with an artificial blue that made everything look underwater. Mara sat on the plastic lounger, nursing her third gin and tonic, watching her husband's silhouette through the sliding glass door of room 147. He'd been on the phone for twenty minutes, laughing in that way she hadn't heard from him in years.

She peeled the orange she'd taken from the complimentary basket, her fingers stained with citrus and cheap wedding rings. The spray of essential oils caught in her throat, suddenly and painfully reminiscent of their honeymoon in Santorini—before the promotions, before the mortgages, before they'd become two people who happened to sleep in the same bed.

From the parking lot came the crack of a baseball hitting a bat. Some father and son playing catch in the twilight. It had been David's dream once, to coach their son's little league team. But there was no son. There was only the clinic appointments, the whispered arguments in bathroom stalls, the way he'd started flinching whenever she mentioned the future.

The sliding door opened. David stepped out, not looking at her, his phone tucked into his pocket like a guilty secret.

"That was work," he said, too quickly.

"I know," she said. "I know it was."

They'd both stopped asking who was on the other end of those calls. Some wounds didn't need to be picked at. Some things were better left to fester in silence, like the untreated water of this pool—technically clear, but underneath, everything was slowly dying.

She took a slice of the orange, held it up to the dying light. "Remember when we thought this would be enough?"

He didn't answer. Just watched the baseball game continuing in the distance, that rhythmic crack of bat against ball, the sound of a childhood they'd never have. The orange rind curled around her finger like a desperate embrace.

"Mara," he started, then stopped.

"Don't," she said. "Just... don't."

They sat there as the sun went down, two strangers married to the same memory, while somewhere far away, a boy ran the bases, and for a moment, everything was exactly as simple as it should be.