Riddles at the Tropicana

The cancer diagnosis hadn't been the death blow; what killed her was David's affair with his assistant, discovered three days later. Elena lay by the **pool** at the Tropicana Resort, watching guests in their pastel swimwear float like detritus on chlorinated **water**. She'd come to her sister's wedding alone, David's text—'think we need space'—still burning on her phone.

A man in a linen shirt sat beside her. Late forties, handsome in a way that suggested he'd once been beautiful. 'You look like a **zombie**,' he said, not unkindly. 'The walking dead variety.'

'Chemotherapy,' she lied. It was easier than explaining her marriage had died before her body had the chance.

He nodded, extended a **palm** lined with stories. 'Marcus. I'm hiding from my ex-wife's second wedding. It's happening over there.' He pointed toward a cabana. 'She married a sphinx of a man—silent, inscrutable, probably wealthy.'

Elena laughed, surprising herself. 'I'm Elena. My sister's the bride. I'm hiding from my husband's girlfriend, who happens to be twenty-three and answers to 'Bree.''

Marcus ordered them drinks. They spent the afternoon trading wounds like war veterans. His infidelity, her abandonment. His estrangement from his daughter, her imminent mastectomy. The lies they told strangers became truths between them.

'The riddle,' Marcus said as sunset turned the pool to gold, 'is whether we're the victims or the villains.'

'Both,' Elena said. 'Neither.' She touched his hand. 'Just people who forgot to live before they started dying.'

They kissed as the wedding band played somewhere behind them. It wasn't the beginning of anything—Marcus was leaving for Key West on Monday, Elena started radiation Tuesday—but it was something.

**Not nothing.**

Later, she'd remember the taste of coconut rum and salt, the way his eyes held hers without flinching from her scar, the sudden revelation that she could still want something. That the end of one story didn't mean she'd become a footnote in someone else's.

She could write her own.