Everything We Leave Behind

The backyard pool sat stagnant, leaves floating on the surface like dead memories. Maggie hadn't touched it since David left three months ago. She stood at the sliding glass door, her cat Bingo winding through her legs, purring with an insistence that felt almost cruel.

"You're hungry again?" she whispered, not moving.

On the television inside, a baseball game played to an empty room. The Dodgers were down by three. David had loved baseball—the ritual of it, the statistics, the way a whole season could hinge on one pitch. He'd tried to teach her once, explaining the geometry of the diamond, the poetry of a perfect curveball. She'd pretended to care. That was the thing about marriage: you learned to fake interest in the things that kept the person you loved from feeling lonely.

She caught her reflection in the glass. Her hair had grown out—David had always preferred it long, said it made her look like the woman he'd married in 2019. Now it fell past her shoulders, a dark curtain she could hide behind. She'd barely cut it since he walked out.

Her phone buzzed. Another text from him: *Can we talk? Please.*

Maggie's thumb hovered over the screen. Outside, the pool cover rippled in the wind. The water beneath was murky, filled with algae and debris. They'd never opened it this summer. They'd never opened anything.

The cat meowed, sharp and demanding.

"Yeah," she said, walking to the kitchen. "Yeah, I know."

She opened a can of cat food, the metal lid popping with a sound like something breaking. Bingo rubbed against her ankles, grateful and present and utterly incapable of the complications that defined human connection. That was the luxury of animals—they loved simply, in the present tense, without collecting grievances like souvenirs.

On the TV, the batter hit a home run. The crowd erupted. Maggie watched the ball arc against a perfect blue sky, that moment before gravity asserted its claim, before everything had to come back down.

She typed: *Tomorrow. 7pm. Neutral ground.*

Then she went to the bathroom, found the scissors she'd bought last week and never used, and began to cut. Her hair fell in dark chunks onto the linoleum. Each snap of the scissors sounded like a period at the end of a very long sentence.

The pool could wait. The Dodgers would lose or win without her. But this—this small, sharp reclaiming of herself—this was something she could control.

Bingo finished eating and wandered into the living room, where the post-game analysis had begun. Maggie kept cutting until she looked like a stranger in the mirror, someone who might be capable of starting over, even if she wasn't sure she wanted to.