Ripples on Glass

The hotel pool was empty at 2 PM, just as Sarah had planned. She needed the silence, needed the water's still surface to match what she'd been trying to cultivate inside herself for three years now. Since the funeral.

She sat in a lounge chair fully dressed, her iPhone face-up on her thigh. Richard's sister had texted earlier: going through his things, found something for you. Sarah had been staring at those twelve words for hours.

"You gonna answer that?"

The voice came from the pool attendant, a teenager with bored eyes and a nametag that read JAVIER. He was leaning against the maintenance shed, a portable radio at his feet.

Sarah blinked. "What?"

"Your phone. It's been lighting up like a Christmas tree." He gestured with his chin. "Whatever it is, it can wait. Pool's peaceful like this. Before the families get here."

She glanced at the iPhone. Another text from Richard's sister. Sarah had been sleeping with his brother for six months now. She hadn't meant for it to happen—grief does strange things, she told herself, grief makes you hunger for anything that tastes like what you've lost. But the taste was becoming its own thing now, separate from memory.

The radio crackled with baseball commentary. Game seven, something about the seventh inning stretch. Richard had loved baseball. Had proposed at a Dodgers game. Had kept her father's old glove in their closet like it was holy.

"You like baseball?" Javier asked, perhaps to fill the silence she'd let stretch too long.

Sarah stood up slowly. "My husband—he used to take me to games. Before he died."

"Sorry," Javier said, actually looking sorry now.

"Don't be." She walked to the pool's edge, toes curling over the concrete. The water was perfectly clear, perfectly still. She could see her own reflection staring back, iPhone clutched against her chest like a prayer. "It's been three years. Sometimes that feels like yesterday. Sometimes it feels like someone else's life."

The radio announcer's voice rose with excitement—home run, something, someone winning. In the reflection, Sarah's phone lit up again with a new message from Richard's brother: where are you? I need to see you.

"Your phone's lighting up again," Javier reminded her.

She looked down at the device, then at the water, then at the reflection of a woman who had spent three years mourning a ghost while slowly, quietly, becoming someone else. Someone who might be ready to choose something real over something remembered.

"I know," Sarah said, and walked away from the pool, away from the reflection, and pressed her thumb to the screen to answer. "I know."