Floaters

The **hat** sat on the edge of the **pool**, a battered Red Sox cap that had belonged to Marcus. Three months after the funeral, Elena still hadn't put it away. She said she kept it there to keep him close, but we both knew she was drowning.

I came over every Sunday with groceries — organic **spinach**, sourdough, whatever she needed to pretend she was still eating properly. The kitchen counters were covered in unopened mail. grief has a way of making ordinary tasks feel like climbing Everest.

"You're hovering again," she said, appearing in the sliding glass door. She wore that oversized swimsuit, the one that made her look like a child playing dress-up.

"I'm your best **friend**. Hovering is in the job description."

She laughed, but her eyes stayed hollow. Marcus had been the one with the laugh that filled rooms. Now the house felt cavernous without him.

We ended up in the pool, floating on our backs like we'd done a thousand times before. Marcus had taught us both to swim in this very pool, back when they bought the house with the optimism of people who think they have forever. Now Elena floated beside me, her hair spreading like dark seawater, and I wondered how much longer I could hold her together before I started sinking too.

"Remember when Marcus tried to play **baseball** with us?" she asked, staring up at the sky. "He kept hitting it into the neighbor's yard."

"He knocked out their window once," I said. "You paid for it."

"I paid for a lot of things."

Silence stretched between us, thick and heavy. The water lapped against the tiles — a sound that should have been peaceful but felt like a countdown.

"I'm selling the house," she said.

I turned my head. Water streamed into my ear. "What?"

"I can't live in a museum, okay? I can't wake up every morning expecting him to be in the kitchen, making coffee too strong and singing off-key. I need to... I need to learn how to exist without him."

The spinach from dinner was stuck between her teeth. A tiny, absurd detail in the middle of her confession. I didn't tell her. Some things felt too sacred to interrupt.

"Okay," I said. "Okay. But you know what this means, right?"

"What?"

"You're going to have to take the hat with you."

She looked at it on the pool deck, worn and faded and carrying all the love she couldn't speak aloud. Then she slipped beneath the water, and when she surfaced, she was smiling — genuinely, for the first time in months.

"Yeah," she said. "I think I can do that."