Midnight at theGeneric Pool

The pool was empty at 2 AM, which was exactly why Mara chose this hour. The fluorescent underwater lights turned the water an otherworldly blue, the color of isolation she'd come to know intimately during six months of quarterly restructuring meetings.

Her frayed charging cable lay across the patio table like a dead snake, its white casing split open to reveal copper veins that had held her phone's battery at 4% just long enough for the video call to connect. On screen, David's face flickered in and out of resolution—a ghost she'd known since they were twenty-two, before promotions and divorces and the slow erosion of whatever they'd once meant to each other.

"Remember when we thought we'd never become them?" David said. His voice lagged by two seconds, the digital delay between San Francisco and wherever he was now. Atlanta, maybe. Or Dallas. The cities blurred together after a while.

Mara trailed her fingers through the pool's heated water. "We didn't become them, David. We became something worse. We became people who don't even know who 'them' is anymore."

The cable sparked once—a tiny constellation of light—before her screen went black. David vanished into the void, his last words cut off mid-sentence. Maybe he'd been about to confess something. Maybe he'd finally admit he'd loved her for fifteen years. Or maybe he'd just been complaining about his property taxes.

She sat there for a long time, listening to the pool's filter hum its mechanical heartbeat, and realized she didn't actually know which option scared her more. The cable had died protecting her from finding out.