Electric Current

The thunderstorm had been raging for hours when Maya's iphone buzzed on the nightstand. She was supposed to be sleeping, but grief had its own schedule, insomnia its own clock.

Across the room, Elena slept with her dark hair fanned across the pillow like spilled ink. They'd been friends since college, twenty years of shared secrets, failed marriages, careers that rose and fell like tides. Now they were both widowed, a coincidence that felt cruel rather than comforting.

Maya reached for the phone. A text from David: I can't stop thinking about you.

Her heart hammered. David—Elena's late husband's best friend, the man who'd been at both their funerals. The man who'd brought lasagna to Maya's door last week, sat with her while she cried.

Another text: I know it's too soon. But I felt something.

Lightning fractured the sky, illuminating the room in stark blue-white. Maya saw Elena's face—eyes open, watching her.

"You saw," Elena said, her voice raspy with sleep or something else.

"I—"

"He sent them to me too. Same messages. Different words."

Maya sat up, the phone slick in her palm. "What?"

Elena rose, went to the window where rain lashed against the glass like handfuls of thrown gravel. "After Robert died, David was everywhere. Bringing meals. Fixing things. Saying the right things. And then the texts started. I thought it was grief, or comfort, or—"

"You didn't tell me."

"You were drowning, Maya. I couldn't—"

"I wasn't the only one."

Silence stretched between them, filled with the sound of water pouring from the gutters.

"He sent me those texts tonight," Maya said. "I thought he was reaching out. I thought maybe—"

"He was reaching," Elena said. "Just not for what we thought."

Another flash of lightning. In its brief illumination, Maya saw Elena's hand press against the glass, leaving a steam print on the cold surface. "He's been seeing someone," Elena continued. "A woman from his yoga class. She's thirty."

"Oh."

"He texts widows. Women like us. Then he shows up, plays the comforting friend. We're not people to him. We're grief tourists." Elena turned. "I found out last week. I was going to tell you, but—"

"But you thought I'd believe him."

"I thought you wanted to."

Maya looked at the phone again, at the words that had made her feel less alone, less broken. Now they felt like something else entirely.

"We're not idiots," she said quietly.

"No," Elena agreed. "We're just lonely."

Outside, the storm began to recede, leaving behind the soft steady rhythm of rain, the kind that sounds like time passing, like healing, like the long work of starting again.