Memory Like a Goldfish

She stood outside his apartment building, fedora pulled low over her eyes—the hat was a ridiculous affectation she'd picked up at a thrift shop, something to make her feel like a character in a noir film instead of a thirty-five-year-old woman checking if her boyfriend was home. Her phone burned in her pocket. Three missed calls. No texts. Just silence.

The goldfish had been her idea—a shared pet, a symbol of commitment they'd purchased three months ago. Now it swam alone in its bowl on his windowsill, visible from the street. She remembered him saying once that goldfish have three-second memories. Lucky them. They'd never remember the moment their trust broke.

She'd left her iPhone on his coffee table that morning. A mistake? No, she told herself it was intentional—a test. Now she stood below his window, watching him pace with the phone to his ear. Talking. Laughing. Not to her.

The fish bumped against the glass.

She thought about climbing the fire escape, about confronting him with evidence she didn't actually have. Instead she watched, and for a moment, she envied the goldfish its endless forgetting. Her own memory stretched back three years of dinners and inside jokes and slow Sunday mornings. Now it seemed the whole relationship might have been something she'd invented—something swimming in circles in too-small space, bumping against walls it couldn't see.

He set down the phone. He walked to the window. For a second, she thought he saw her.

Then he just closed the blinds.