Lightning Over Still Water

The spinach was wilted, turning warm and slimy against the back of her throat. Elena pushed the salad away and stared at the infinity pool instead—the way the water blurred into nothingness, exactly like the last three years of her marriage.

She'd become something pathetic in the last six months: a spy in her own life. Checking David's phone when he showered. Tracking his location through the shared family plan. Last week she'd found a receipt for jewelry she'd never received—a gold necklace, purchased three days before their anniversary, never worn, never mentioned. The detective she'd hired said David was having dinner twice a week with a woman who worked in his building. Elena had pictured her. Younger. Thinner. Someone who still made plans, still believed in things.

"You're going to prune out there," a voice said.

Elena jumped. A maintenance man was skimming leaves from the pool's surface. The net snagged something orange and flashing—a goldfish, somehow escaped from the resort's decorative pond, now belly-up in the chlorine.

"They don't last," the man said, scooping it out. "Pretty, though."

Elena felt sick. She was the goldfish. She was the woman in the building. She was everyone and no one, swimming in circles while the water went bad around her.

The sky had turned bruised purple. A storm was rolling in off the ocean. The first bolt of lightning cracked the horizon—a white scar through the clouds, illuminating everything in that stark, awful way that shows you exactly what's there.

And what was there was David, standing at the edge of the pool area, watching her.

He looked exhausted. His shirt was untucked. He held something in his hand—a small box, velvet-covered. He'd been hiding things, yes. Planning things. The detective had missed the important part entirely.

"I was going to do it at dinner," David said, walking toward her through the half-light. "But you've been somewhere else for months, Elena. I didn't know if you'd even notice."

He opened the box. The gold necklace caught another flash of lightning—delicate, impossibly thin.

"It's not for an affair," he said quietly. "It's been in my glove compartment since February. I couldn't figure out the right moment anymore."

The first raindrop hit Elena's cheek. She thought of the goldfish, how it had swum its whole life in circles, never knowing there was an ocean beyond the glass. She thought of herself, surveilling her own marriage from the outside, convinced she was trapped when she'd simply forgotten how to be present.

"I'm tired," she heard herself say. "David, I'm so tired of being a spy in my own life."

He sat beside her on the lounge chair and took her hand. His palm was warm and familiar and she realized she'd forgotten this too—the simple, unmonitored fact of being known.

"Then stop spying," he said. "Just come back."

The rain began in earnest then, washing the wilted salad away, washing the loneliness away, leaving nothing but the two of them, finally, in the storm.