Last Lap

The pool water was colder than she expected, but Elena kept swimming. Lap after lap, the rhythmic churn of her arms through water drowning out everything else. The office could wait. The emails from David could wait. The furious voicemail from her sister could definitely wait.

She surfaced at the pool's edge, gasping, and noticed something floating near the drain: a clump of gray fur, matted and sodden. Cat hair. Her chest tightened.

It belonged to David's cat, the one he'd insisted they adopt together, the one that had slept between them every night for three years. He'd kept the cat in the breakup. Had he been here? At her pool? Or had she simply carried the evidence of him with her, stuck to her swimsuit like a stubborn memory?

"You're not really swimming if you're not moving forward," her swim coach had told her last week, just before she'd learned that David was engaged to someone new. Someone younger. Someone who didn't have gray hairs starting to thread through her dark hair, who didn't have laugh lines that deepened when she was tired.

She tread water, watching the gray fur circle lazily in the current. She'd been treading water for months, since the promotion that made her colleagues look at her with something between resentment and pity. Since the divorce papers had been signed and filed. Since she'd started coming here every evening, swimming until her muscles burned and her thoughts finally quieted.

A stray cat, orange and scrawny, appeared at the pool's edge, tail twitching as it regarded her with mild interest. It dipped one paw into the water, testing. Then another.

"Don't," she called out softly. "It's colder than it looks."

The cat pulled back, shook its paw, and sat watching her with something like judgment. Elena began to laugh, a hollow sound that echoed off the tiles. She was taking life advice from a stray cat now.

She swam to the ladder and pulled herself out, water streaming from her hair, her skin, her every pore. The fur was still floating in the pool, already beginning to sink. She could fish it out. She could let it dissolve into nothing like all the other things she'd lost.

Instead, she grabbed her towel and walked toward the locker room, leaving the water behind her. Tomorrow she'd swim faster. Tomorrow she'd actually move forward.