Gravity

The hotel pool shimmered with an artificial blue that no natural body of water had ever possessed. Elena sat at the edge, her legs submerged up to the knees, watching the way the ripples distorted her pale calves. Beyond the wrought-iron fence, palm trees stood like sentinels against a sky that refused to darken, even at seven in the evening.

She had stopped crying an hour ago. Now there was just the hollowed-out space where something real used to live.

"You've been carrying this for too long," Sarah had told her yesterday, pressing a folded piece of paper into Elena's palm before walking away. "The weight doesn't get lighter. You just get used to the ache of it."

Elena had wanted to scream that she was already used to it—the way a bear grows accustomed to hibernation, to the long dark, to the hunger that settles in the marrow. But she had said nothing. She never said anything anymore. Not to Sarah. Not to Marcus. Not to the version of herself that stared back from bathroom mirrors, increasingly indistinguishable from a stranger.

A single goldfish—how it had gotten into the pool, she couldn't fathom—glided past her legs, its scales catching the last of the sun. Someone's abandoned pet, or perhaps an accidental escape from the lobby aquarium. It moved with the terrible freedom of something that didn't know it was dying.

She thought about Marcus's confession last night, how he'd said her name like it was something he was trying to remember, not something he'd known for eight years. The other woman didn't matter. What mattered was the way he'd looked at her—as if she were a problem he'd finally solved, a weight he'd finally set down.

Elena stood up, water streaming down her legs. The goldfish vanished into the deep end.

She didn't go back to their room. Instead, she walked to the hotel bar and ordered a martini, very dry, and when the bartender asked if everything was alright, she surprised herself by laughing—a genuine sound, sharp and sudden, like glass breaking.

"Actually," she said, "I think it might be."