Current Events

The cat watched from the windowsill—Julian's cat now, technically—those amber eyes tracking my last bag as I packed it. Three years of marriage reduced to a single suitcase. Outside, rain slicked the streets of Chicago, and I thought about swimming, how I'd promised myself I'd start again once the deadline passed, once the *bull* market turned and the options vested. Instead, I'd only learned to tread water.

"You're being dramatic," Julian said from the doorway, loosening his tie. He always looked most like himself right after work, that precise moment before he untucked his shirt and became someone else entirely. Someone who'd forgotten what it meant to want the same things.

"I'm being precise." I zipped the bag. "Precision isn't drama."

He laughed, and the sound was so familiar it made my chest ache. "That's cable news talking. Everything's a breaking story with you."

The *cable* guy was coming tomorrow—my final appointment as his wife, scheduled to transfer the account to my name at the new place. Another thing divided like property, like the cat who'd chosen his lap over mine sometime around year two, when the late nights at the bureau had started outweighing the dinners at home.

I drove north toward Lincoln Park, toward the building with the rooftop pool where I'd signed a lease yesterday. The rain had stopped. On Lake Shore Drive, a fox darted across the road—odd for the city, odder still for dawn. It paused in the headlights, coat bright against the asphalt, before vanishing toward the lake.

Something about it felt like an omen. Foxes were adaptable. They survived in spaces they weren't meant to occupy. They made homes in territories that rejected them, over and over.

At the pool, no one was there. The water reflected pinkening sky, and I stripped down to nothing because there was no one to see, no one to perform for. I slipped into the cold water and began to swim—not for exercise, not for distance, but for the sheer improbable fact of motion.

The cat would adjust. Julian would find someone new. The *cable* would be installed in an apartment I'd make a home, and the *bull* market would eventually cycle bearish again. But right now, I was just swimming, I was still here, and for the first time in years, the water was entirely my own.