Chlorine and Regret

The hotel pool was empty at 2 AM, its surface still except for the ripple from Maria's bare feet dangling in the water. She sat on the edge, a small bottle of **vitamin** D pills on the concrete beside her. The doctor had prescribed them last week—"Your levels are dangerously low," he'd said, as if her entire life had become a series of deficiencies.

She swallowed one pill dry. Her mother used to say that **spinach** made you strong. Maria had hated it as a child, the way it slimed her teeth, how her mother would boil it into submission until it tasted like disappointment. Last night, she'd ordered a spinach salad at dinner alone, trying to convince herself she'd become someone who appreciated bitter things.

The **pool** lights cast undulating shadows across the ceiling—like ghosts dancing, she thought. That was the problem with being forty-three and newly divorced: everything became a metaphor.

A splash interrupted her. A man emerged from the deep end, slicking wet hair from his forehead. He looked like David—same jawline, same way his shoulders hunched when cold.

"Mind if I join?" he asked.

She should have said no. Instead she nodded, watching him pull himself up to sit beside her, their hands nearly touching on the rough concrete.

"Can't sleep either?" he asked.

"My doctor says I don't get enough sunlight," she said, gesturing to the vitamin bottle.

He laughed. "Mine says I need more fiber. God, we're falling apart, aren't we?"

"I make a good spinach salad," she heard herself say. Why?

He looked at her then—really looked at her. "My ex-wife made excellent spinach. Too much garlic, but still."

They sat in silence for a long moment. The pool filter hummed. Maria thought about how she'd spent twenty years becoming someone who made perfect spinach, someone who remembered vitamins, someone who was careful and practical and reliable. And David had left her for someone who was none of those things.

"I'm Maria," she said finally.

"Thomas."

"Are you going to swim, Thomas? Or just sit here being sad?"

He smiled—a real smile, not the polite one. "Both."

Maria slid into the water. It was cold and shocking and alive. Sometimes that was enough.