Electric Blue

The receptionist's pool party had been Sarah's idea. Something about networking, about making connections at the firm. But David stood at the edge of the infinity pool, nursing a whiskey he didn't want, watching the water lap against the tiles like a tongue testing a sore tooth.

They'd been fighting for weeks. Quiet, submarine wars fought in the space between loaded questions and silent dinners. The lawyer from accounts—a man whose name David refused to learn—kept touching Sarah's arm. She didn't move away. The water reflected the pool lights in fracturing ribbons of blue, and David thought about how easy it would be to just step forward and let himself sink.

"You're brooding," a voice said behind him.

David turned. Elena, the senior partner's wife, stood there with a cat curled around her neck like a stole. The animal—some expensive breed with silver fur—regarded him with eyes the color of judgment.

"I'm contemplating," David said.

"The marriage or the water?" Elena scratched the cat's chin. "Mr. Whiskers here can smell a divorce three states away. He sat with a couple in Chicago last October, and by Christmas, she'd kept the apartment."

David laughed despite himself. "That's absurd."

"Is it?" The cat purred, a rumble like distant thunder. "Look at them."

David looked. Sarah laughed at something the lawyer said—head thrown back, throat exposed, entirely alive in a way she hadn't been with him in months. Lightning fractured the sky behind the hills, a silent crack that illuminated everything for one stark second before the world went dark again.

"Sometimes," Elena said, as the first fat drops of rain began to fall, "the storm has to break before you can see what's already gone."

The lawyer's hand settled on Sarah's lower back. She didn't flinch. She leaned in.

David finished his whiskey in one swallow. The taste was sharp, final. He set the glass on a nearby table with deliberate care, like placing a period at the end of a sentence he'd been writing for seven years.

"Good cat," he told Mr. Whiskers.

He walked toward the exit, not looking back at the water or the woman beside it or the life he was leaving behind. The rain began in earnest, washing everything clean.