Electric Distance

The iphone had been silent for three days.

Mara knew what this meant. The silence between texts had grown from minutes to hours to days, and now the device lay on her nightstand like a paperweight, its black screen reflecting nothing but her own face back at her.

She laced up her running shoes anyway. Some habits survived even when everything else was falling apart.

The storm had been brewing all afternoon, the sky turning that particular shade of bruised purple that made her chest tight. Outside, the air smelled of ozone and impending rain. Their golden retriever, Barnaby, pressed his warm weight against her leg, sensing something wrong. His amber eyes followed her as she stretched at the door.

"Come on, then," she whispered.

They ran through neighborhoods she and David had walked together a thousand times. The palm trees lining the streets swayed in the wind, their fronds tearing loose like old resolutions. The dog kept pace, his golden coat catching the last light before the clouds swallowed the sun completely.

The first drops hit when they were three miles from home. Then came the lightning — not distant flashes but immediate, terrifying forks of white that split the sky directly overhead. The air crackled. Hair stood on her arms.

Barnaby stopped, tugging backward, his tail between his legs.

Mara stood breathing hard in the downpour, rain plastering her hair to her face. The iphone buzzed in her pocket.

She almost didn't check it. Almost let it wash away in the storm.

But habits are hard things to break.

David's name on the screen. Three words: I'm coming home.

She stood there in the torrential rain, the dog shivering against her leg, the lightning illuminating everything she'd been too afraid to see clearly. Sometimes destruction came before rebuilding. Sometimes you had to let the sky break open before you could find the courage to answer.

The screen glowed against her palm as she typed the only thing that mattered:

I'll be here.