Diving Board

The pool at the Marriott Courtyard was smaller than it looked on the website—a concrete oval filled with chlorinated water that smelled like old memories and bad decisions. Elena sat at the edge, legs dangling in, watching the ripples distort her reflection. She was forty-three, and this was the year everything was supposed to change.

Inside, the corporate retreat raged on. Someone had ordered spinach wraps for lunch—vegan, gluten-free, joyless—and Mark had made a joke about it that didn't land. He always made jokes that didn't land anymore. Their colleagues laughed anyway, the same way they'd laughed when Elena announced she was leaving the firm to start her own practice. She'd seen the betting pool afterward. Five bucks said she'd be back within six months.

The water lapped at her calves, cold and impersonal. She thought about spinach—how it always got stuck in your teeth, how no one ever told you. How Mark had stopped noticing anything about her years ago, except when it inconvenienced him. Last night he'd asked if she was going to wear that dress to the gala. Not the dress. That dress.

"There you are."

She didn't turn. Mark's shadow fell across her. He'd loosened his tie. His spinach wrap stain was still on his cuff.

"Your assistants are looking for you. Something about the Q3 projections."

"Let them wait."

"Elena."

"What."

"Are you coming back inside?"

The pool lights flickered on, automating against the dusk. Blue washed over them both. She thought about how water could be soft or hard, how it could sustain you or drown you. How you could be in it so long you forgot what it felt like to breathe air.

She stood up, water dripping down her legs. "No."

Mark sighed. The sound was familiar, weighted down by seventeen years of mutual disappointment. "This again."

"Not this again. Just this. The last time."

He stared at her, and for the first time in years, he actually seemed to see her. "What are you saying?"

Elena walked past him toward the hotel entrance, leaving wet footprints on the concrete that would evaporate before anyone noticed they'd been there at all.