Chlorine and Regret

Marie lay on a lounge chair at the hotel pool, the blue water glinting like something she couldn't quite reach. This was supposed to be their anniversary trip—five years—but David had canceled three days before, citing an emergency merger at the firm. She'd come alone, half-hoping he'd surprise her, half-knowing he wouldn't.

She swallowed the vitamin D supplement with warm bottled water. The fertility specialist had said it might help, along with everything else—the hormone injections, the timed cycles, the prayer. God, she was tired of trying. Tired of the temperature charts and the optimistic pharmaceutical commercials that promised miracle babies to women who'd just given up.

"Mind if I join you?"

Marie opened one eye. A man in his forties, graying at the temples, expensive watch. The kind of man David aspired to be.

"Free country," she said.

He sat two chairs down, respectful but present. They made small talk—where are you from, what do you do, the lonely choreography of strangers looking not to be alone. His name was Mark. He was in town for a conference. His wife had left him for someone younger, someone who didn't work eighty-hour weeks.

"She said I'd forgotten how to be happy," Mark said, staring at the pool's rippling surface. "She was right."

Marie thought about David, about the vitamins she took every morning and night, about the baby that wasn't coming. She thought about the fights they'd stopped having because they were too exhausted.

A calico cat padded around the pool's edge, thin but graceful, eyeing them. It hopped onto Mark's chair, curled into his lap like it belonged there.

"I've never seen a pool cat," Marie said, surprised into a smile.

"Maybe she knows lonely when she sees it," Mark said, scratching behind its ears.

They sat there until sunset, the cat purring, the pool turning from blue to gold to gray. When Marie returned to her empty room, she called David.

"We need to talk," she said.

"Now? It's late."

"Yes. Now."

She thought about the cat, about Mark's confession, about how some things are worth saving and some are just habits. She opened her handbag and took out the vitamin bottle—just one of dozens—and set it on the nightstand.

Tomorrow she'd figure out what came next. But tonight, for the first time in years, she didn't take it.