Chlorine and Regret

The hotel pool shimmered like something out of a magazine she couldn't afford, and Elena stood at its edge wearing a swimsuit that cost three days' wages. Her corporate retreat. Forty-five years old and still playing these games.

"You coming in?" Marcus called from the water. He'd been her department head for seven years, her lover for six months. The secret that tasted like vitamin supplements—necessary, swallowed whole, leaving a faint aftertaste of shame.

Elena touched her hair, now flat against her skull from humidity. She'd spent an hour this morning making it look effortless. The effort, as always, invisible.

"In a minute," she said.

In the hotel lobby earlier, she'd watched a massive aquarium and counted the goldfish—twenty-three, twenty-four—darting through neon-lit water, trapped in glass that someone else cleaned. She'd felt a strange kinship. She'd been working at the firm for eighteen years. She knew every system, every shortcut, every body buried in the spreadsheet.

Marcus paddled closer to the edge. Water slicked his hair back. He looked younger than forty-two. He looked like someone who'd never carried anything heavier than a choice he didn't want to make.

"You're thinking about the merger," he said. Not a question.

"I'm thinking about goldfish."

"What?"

"Their memory span. Three seconds. Imagine that."

Marcus laughed, rippling the water. "You're exhausted, El. You've been a zombie since the audit started. Come in. The water's perfect."

She stepped into the pool. The water cooled her sun-baked skin. Marcus's hands found her waist underwater, possessive, familiar. She should feel something. She should feel grateful or desired or at least present.

Instead she watched the hotel guests around them—talking, laughing, living lives that seemed to belong to actual people. And she wondered: if she stayed underwater long enough, would she eventually forget everything that happened before? Would three seconds of memory be a mercy or a tragedy?

Marcus kissed her neck. "Stay tonight," he whispered. "Skip the flight."

"And tell my daughter what?"

"Tell her you're taking a vitamin. For yourself."

Elena pulled away and swam to the center of the pool, where the water deepened to blue opacity. She floated on her back and looked up at the sky, so bright it hurt. She could stay here. She could become someone who made selfish choices. She could be the kind of person who didn't care about twenty-three goldfish in a tank, waiting for someone to remember they existed.

She treaded water for a long time. Then she swam back to the edge and pulled herself out.

"My flight leaves at seven," she said, and didn't look back to see if he was watching.