Everything Drowns Eventually

The faucet wouldn't stop dripping, even after Marcus replaced the washer twice. *Water* — always the water, lately. It followed him: the leaking roof at work, the flooded basement, now this. Elena watched him from the doorway, her silhouette against the hallway's half-light, and he felt the familiar tightening in his chest — the same panic he'd been *running* from for three years, since the miscarriage they never discussed, since the promotion he didn't want, since everything between them had become a series of loaded silences and separate beds.

"You're going back out there, aren't you?" she said, not a question.

"The client meeting—" Marcus started, but stopped. The lie felt heavy in his mouth, tasting like copper.

Elena stepped closer, and he saw she'd been crying. Recent tears, too. "Marcus, I found the receipts. The hotel downtown. Every Tuesday and Thursday for six months."

The room tilted. Something primal in him responded, a reflex — the instinct to keep moving, to stay ahead of the truth. But then she did something unexpected: she laughed, a hollow, awful sound. "The worst part isn't the affair. It's that I looked at your phone, and she texts you about *swimming* lessons. For her son. You're playing stepfather to some stranger's child while we can barely look at each other across the dinner table."

Marcus stared at her. The faucet kept dripping, a metronome counting down something unnamed.

"I'm lonely, El," he whispered. "I'm drowning here."

"Then stop treading water, Marcus. Either swim toward something real or just let yourself sink." She touched his arm, her fingers cool. "But this — this half-life — it's killing us both."

The faucet dripped. *Water, water everywhere.* Marcus closed his eyes and heard, with terrible clarity, the sound of his own marriage coming apart, drop by drop by drop.