Evidence of Summer

The goldfish in the ceramic bowl on Marcus's mantel had been swimming the same lazy circles for three years. I watched it while he slept, its orange scales catching the morning light that filtered through the blackout curtains we never quite closed. People said goldfish had no memory, but I suspected this one remembered everything—the raised voices, the whispered apologies, the way I'd started leaving my toothbrush here without being asked.

"You're thinking again," Marcus murmured from behind me, his voice rough with sleep. "I can hear it."

I turned from the fish. His dark hair was mussed against the pillow, streaked with silver I'd watched spread over the past two years like winter through a forest. My own hair—copper, stubborn, and now salted with strands of white at the temples—was caught in the watch on his nightstand. I'd meant to leave it there. Evidence. The way women had always left things: handkerchiefs, lipsticked cigarettes, children.

"I'm thinking about papaya," I said, which wasn't entirely a lie.

He laughed, the sound vibrating through the sheets. "What about it?"

"How you hated it when we met. In that hotel restaurant in Jakarta. You said it tasted like soap."

"And you said I had no sophistication." He reached for my hand, his palm warm against mine. "That was four years ago, Elena. Before."

Before his marriage had started unraveling. Before I'd taken the consulting contract that put me in his city every third week. Before the hotel rooms and the separate lives and the careful architecture of forgetting how this began.

"Marcus," I said, and my voice surprised me with its steadiness. "I can't do this anymore."

The goldfish broke its pattern, darting suddenly to the surface of its bowl.

He went still. The morning light caught the silver in his hair, the lines around his eyes that deepened when he smiled but had lately deepened anyway. "This what?"

"All of it. The hiding. The waiting." I pulled my hand from his. "My sister's getting married in October. I'm going home."

"You said you weren't going back."

"I'm thirty-six, Marcus. I'm tired of living out of a suitcase. Tired of being the person you call when your wife visits her mother."

"You're the person I love," he said, but it sounded like something he'd practiced in mirrors.

"Then prove it."

He didn't speak. The goldfish resumed its circles.

I gathered my clothes from the floor, my hair falling across my face as I dressed. Outside, the city was waking up. Somewhere, a fruit vendor was slicing papaya for breakfast, its flesh the color of sunrise. Somewhere, someone was beginning something honest.

I left the toothbrush.