Palm Fronds at Midnight

Maya pressed her **palm** against the sliding glass door, feeling the cold condensation slick against her skin. Outside, **lightning** fractured the sky over Key West, illuminating the swaying fronds like skeletal fingers in the dark.

"You're still taking them?" David's voice came from behind her. He was holding the bottle of prenatal **vitamin** supplements—expensive, organic, carefully researched. They'd emptied half the bottle before the second miscarriage.

"I paid eighty dollars for these," she said, not turning around. "I finish what I start."

"Maya."

"What?"

"The market crashed today. I'm down four years of savings. That **bull** run everybody rode? We weren't on it." He laughed bitterly. "I chased the wrong alpha."

She finally turned. His face was shadowed, unreadable. They'd come to this resort to reconnect, to heal, but mostly they'd been drinking overpriced wine and having conversations that went nowhere.

"I was going to tell you something," she said. "Before the phone rang. Before you checked your portfolio."

"What?" He stepped closer.

"I don't want to try again. The treatments, the hope cycles, the—" she gestured at the vitamin bottle "—the pills that were supposed to fix something that isn't broken."

The room went silent except for rain drumming the roof. Outside, lightning struck somewhere close, and for a second, everything was white as day.

"So what then?" David's voice was quiet.

"We're thirty-eight, David. We could adopt. Or we could be that couple who travels. Or we could just... figure out who we are without the project."

He set the bottle on the counter. Behind him, through the glass doors, a palm tree bent nearly horizontal in the wind, then sprang back.

"I always thought," he said slowly, "that if we couldn't have kids, I'd failed somehow. Like I'd missed the whole point of being a man."

Maya walked over and took his hands. "You know what my grandmother said? She said marriage is just two people deciding not to kill each other. Everything else is details."

David laughed—a real laugh this time. "She said that?"

"She was married for sixty-two years. She knew what she was talking about."

Outside, the storm was already moving east, leaving behind dripping palms and that strange clean silence that comes after chaos. Maya wrapped her arms around his waist, and for the first time in months, he didn't pull away.