Poolside Pyramids

Margot stood by the resort pool at sunset nursing a gin and tonic she couldn't taste anymore. The last time she'd been here, five years ago, she'd worn that ridiculous oversized sun hat he'd bought her as a joke, the one that made her look like a deranged garden party guest. She'd left it behind in the hotel room when she walked out on him. On the flight home, she'd realized she'd also left her dignity.

The pool was empty except for a woman doing laps with fierce precision—each stroke cutting through the water like she was trying to slice something out of her past. Margot watched her and thought about pyramid schemes. Not the illegal kind, though Lord knows her brother had gotten tangled in enough of those. She meant the emotional ones. The way you invest so much of yourself into someone else's vision of happiness that you end up at the bottom of the structure, holding up everyone else's dreams while your own crumbled.

"You're going to burn," a voice said beside her.

Margot turned. A man in his fifties, handsome in that way that suggests money and careful maintenance. He was holding two drinks.

"I'm just thinking about bulls," she said, and immediately wanted to drown herself in the pristine blue water. What was wrong with her? "Bull markets, I mean. My job. I'm a financial analyst."

He nodded like this made perfect sense. "The bull always wins. Until it doesn't."

"Exactly." Margot set down her glass. "I keep coming back to this place because I think I'll find something I lost. But what I lost was the ability to believe in pyramids. You know? Hierarchies. Structures built on the backs of people who convince themselves they're climbing toward something worthwhile."

The stranger considered this. "The view from the top is lonely," he said finally. "But the air is different up there."

"Maybe," Margot said. "Or maybe you just run out of oxygen and start believing your own bullshit."

He laughed, surprising her. It was genuine. "I sold my company last year. Made more money than I'll ever spend. You know what I did first?"

"What?"

"Bought a hat," he said. "A ridiculous, expensive, unnecessary hat. And then I came here to sit by this pool and realize I still don't know what the hell I'm doing."

Margot found herself smiling for the first time in months. "That's the most honest thing anyone's said to me in five years."

"The pyramid," he said, gesturing vaguely at the resort's architecture, all angles and ambition reaching toward nothing, "is just a pile of stones arranged to impress people who are already dead."

"Well," Margot said, finishing her drink and feeling something like hope flicker in her chest. "At least we're not building them anymore."