Chlorine Hearts

The pool at the Hôtel Lutetia was empty at 3 AM, which was exactly why Elena had chosen it. She slipped into the water, her vitamin regimen abandoned along with her marriage somewhere in a shambles of a Detroit suburb. The pills were supposed to fix everything—her fatigue, her brittle hair, the hollow space where joy used to be. But sometimes a vitamin is just another way of pretending that broken things can be patched with a supplement.

She floated on her back, staring at the glass ceiling where Paris rain streaked the panes like the tears she refused to cry anymore. The water buoyed her up, held her in a way that David's hands hadn't in years. His touch had become perfunctory, a scheduled obligation like their mandatory date nights and the increasingly desperate attempts to manufacture intimacy.

That's when she saw him.

A man in a dark suit, standing at the pool's edge, watching her. Not a guest—guests didn't wear shoes like that, didn't carry themselves with that particular stillness. He was, she realized with a cold jolt of clarity, a spy. Not for the government. For David.

Her husband had hired someone. He'd actually gone through with it.

She trod water, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. The spy didn't approach, didn't speak. He simply watched, his presence an accusation more damning than any shouting match could ever be. This was what their marriage had become: surveillance and suspicion, calibrated like the precise doses of her supplements.

Elena swam to the edge and pulled herself up, water streaming from her body like a second skin shedding. She walked past the spy without looking at him, her wet footsteps marking the path away from a life that had become as artificial as the fluorescent-blue water behind her.

In her room, she stared at the bottle of vitamins on the nightstand, then swept them into the trash. Some deficiencies, she realized, have no cure in pill form. Some things must simply be allowed to end.