Disconnected

The cable had been out for three days when Elena finally stopped running.

She'd been pounding the pavement since sunrise, her trainers slapping against wet pavement, each step a desperate bid to outpace the thoughts clawing at her insides. But somewhere around mile seven, her body had staged a mutiny. Now she sat on her living room floor, sweat cooling on her skin, surrounded by the static silence of a disconnected world.

The TV screen remained stubbornly black. No news. No distractions. No escape.

Her phone buzzed with Marcus's third message of the morning. She didn't need to read it to know what it said. *We need to talk.* The words that had unraveled everything two nights ago, the same words that had sent her fleeing into the predawn darkness.

Elena's gaze drifted to the glass bowl on the windowsill. Inside, her goldfish — a carnival prize she'd won eight months ago, on what was supposed to be their anniversary — floated sideways in the water. Its gills moved in slow, labored pumps. A symptom of something she couldn't fix, a finality she'd been postponing with daily water changes and overfeeding, as if caring for something fragile could somehow balance the scales of what she'd broken.

The morning sun caught the orange peel on the counter where she'd left it yesterday. Its bright rind had begun to brown, pitted and shriveled — evidence that time moved forward regardless of her stillness.

She'd been running for months, really. From the conversation they hadn't had. From the admission that the woman she'd become bore little resemblance to the one Marcus had married. From the possibility that some fractures couldn't be mended.

The goldfish's gill movements slowed.

Elena stood up, her legs trembling. She crossed to the windowsill and watched the fish's struggle, this tiny thing fighting for something she'd spent weeks running away from.

She picked up her phone.

Her thumbs hovered over the screen, then typed: *Come over. We can talk.*

The cable was still out. The goldfish was dying. But for the first time in a long time, Elena wasn't running.