Everything We Didn't Say

The margarita sweated onto the **pool**-side table, condensation rings spreading like my doubts. Marcus's phone buzzed again—work, always work—and I watched his thumb hover over the screen before he thought better of it.

"You're going to answer it," I said. Not a question.

"It's the merger, Sarah. You know what's at stake." His **palm** found my knee, the gesture so practiced it had lost all meaning. Like **baseball** games he'd missed because someone somewhere needed something from him. Our tenth anniversary trip to Cabo, and here we were.

I stood up, the lounge chair scraping against concrete. "You know what I keep thinking about? That night we found that stray **cat** in our first apartment together. How we stayed up all night with it, both of us crying like idiots when it finally let us touch it. We were going to be different. We weren't going to become our parents."

Marcus flinched. That hit home. His father had worked himself into an early grave, his mother still waited by the phone.

"That cat died, Sarah. That's what happens to things that can't fend for themselves."

The words hung between us, cruel and true. I walked toward our cabana, my bare feet burning on the tile. Behind me, the **palm** fronds rustled in the breeze, indifferent witnesses to another marriage's slow death.

"You know what you are?" I called back, not turning around. "You're **bear**ing the weight of expectations you never questioned. And the worst part is, you've convinced yourself it's noble."

I heard his chair scrape. Then his voice, cracked open at last: "I'm scared I can't be the man you need and still survive this."

I stopped. The pool's blue water shimmered before me, reflecting a sky too beautiful for this moment.

"Then stop surviving," I said. "Start living."

The silence stretched. Somewhere distant, a phone buzzed again. Neither of us moved to answer it.