Salt Water divination

Elena floated on her back in the hotel pool at midnight, the chlorine stinging her eyes, wondering how forty-two years had distilled down to this — swimming laps in silence while her husband slept three floors above. The divorce papers sat in her purse like a dead thing.

She'd come to Cabo for what Marcus called "a last attempt" but they both knew it was an autopsy, not a rescue mission.

Earlier that evening, a woman with roses tattooed on her shoulder had grabbed Elena's hand at the bar, pressing her palm. "You're leaving something," the woman said. "Or someone." Elena had pulled away, finished her drink, ordered another.

Now, in the water, she thought about Marcus's new assistant — twenty-six, sharp in all the ways that mattered, clever as a fox in the henhouse of their marriage. The way Marcus looked at her. The way he'd started coming home late with "urgent emails."

Elena had done the math. She wasn't stupid.

She swam to the pool's edge and pulled herself up, water streaming from her hair. The resort's palm trees cast long shadows in the moonlight, their fronds motionless in the tropical night. She thought about how she'd built her life around him, how she'd pruned and shaped herself like a topiary, bending toward his light until she'd forgotten which way she'd naturally grow.

Tomorrow she would tell him. Tonight, she would swim until her muscles burned, until the salt water — imaginary, remembered, from another life, another ocean — washed her clean.

She dove back into the deep end, and for a moment, weightless and suspended in the dark water, she could almost believe she was already someone else.