Poolside at the Omni

The hat was the first thing Marcus noticed when he walked into the ballroom—a fedora, really, sitting askew on the head of some junior accounts manager from Chicago. Who wears fedoras to corporate retreats? The year is 2026, not 1926. Marcus adjusted his own perfectly serviceable baseball cap and headed toward the open bar, though he stopped himself when he remembered he was three weeks sober. Again.

The third day of the company-wide summit always broke him. The motivational speakers blur together. The breakout sessions are little more than elaborate trust exercises designed to extract maximum productivity from minimum employees. He'd spent the morning in a room full of people he'd known for seven years, folding themselves into pretzel shapes on yoga mats while someone named Brenda from HR talked about corporate synergy as if it were a vitamin you could purchase at GNC.

"Take one daily and unlock your full potential," she'd said. Marcus had almost laughed out loud.

He found himself by the indoor pool, watching the water ripple under the artificial lights. The humidity reminded him inexplicably of summer 2019, the last time he and Sarah had gone anywhere together. They'd stayed at a place like this, eaten overpriced room service, pretended they weren't already five years into a slow-motion separation. The pool had been empty then too.

Behind him, the massive flat-screen TV blared CNN on an endless loop, mounted with an HDMI cable that draped down the wall like a dead snake. He watched the ticker crawl across the bottom: inflation, layoffs, climate collapse. The usual. Somewhere in the distance, he could hear the rhythmic splashing of someone doing laps, cutting through the water with purpose and direction, two things he'd entirely lost.

That was when the fedora guy appeared beside him, offering him a plate of tiny appetizers from the networking mixer. "You look like you need this," he said with a grin that was either charming or oblivious.

Marcus stared down at the offerings. Wrapped in prosciutto, stuffed with cheese, baked to golden perfection. Spinach, he realized. Artichoke spinach dip bites, Sarah's specialty, the first dish she'd ever made for him back when they were twenty-two and broke and cooking in a kitchen the size of a closet.

"No thanks," he said, and his voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. "I'm good."

The guy shrugged and wandered off toward a group of women from marketing, leaving Marcus alone with the chlorine smell and the cable and the distant, rhythmic splashing that sounded, suddenly, like the ocean.

He pulled his phone from his pocket, scrolled through three years of text messages, found the last one Sarah had sent before she moved out. Nothing dramatic, no screaming match. Just: *I think we're both just pretending to be people we're not.*

Marcus typed a response, deleted it, typed again. Three years of this particular hell, and he still didn't know what to say.

"Excuse me?" A woman in hotel uniform stood nearby, holding a small tray of single-serving packets. "Vitamin C? Vitamin D? We're offering complimentary immunity boosters by the pool."

Marcus stared at her. Then he started laughing, the real kind, the kind that hurts your ribs and makes your eyes water. The fedora guy looked over from across the room, concerned.

"Give me whatever you've got," Marcus said. "All of it."

Some things, he realized, even vitamins couldn't fix.

But some things, maybe, you could still swim toward.