Signal Lost

The iPhone lay face-down on the hotel room nightstand, its screen illuminating the darkness every time a new notification slid across the glass. Mara hadn't looked at it in three hours. She lay in the bed she'd shared with David for seven years—sheets still carrying the faint scent of his cologne—and watched the phone pulse like a dying heart.

Her palm pressed against the empty space beside her, the mattress still holding the indent where he'd slept last night. This morning, over lukewarm coffee and the Sunday paper, David had told her he was leaving. Not for another woman. Not for a midlife crisis. He was leaving because he'd realized, somewhere between their second mortgage and his father's funeral, that he'd forgotten how to want anything at all.

"I'm not running away," he'd said, standing in their bedroom with a half-packed duffel. "I'm just... I need to remember what it feels like to choose something."

The phone vibrated again. Probably her sister, or maybe Sarah from accounting who'd cc'd her on those weekend emails about the Q3 projections. She should answer. Mara was the person who always answered—the reliable one, the organized one, the one who kept the household running like a well-oiled machine while David slowly dissolved inside it.

She turned her palm upward and traced the lifeline with her thumb. A fortune teller in New Orleans had once told her she lived too much in other people's futures. She'd laughed, buying a crystal paperweight she didn't need, and gone back to her consulting job helping companies optimize workflows they'd created to feel productive.

Outside, rain began to drum against the window, and somewhere in the distance, sirens wailed. The phone's screen lit up one final time before the battery died, cutting off whatever messages, demands, or concerns the world wanted to hurl at her.

In the sudden quiet, Mara realized her shoulders had dropped two inches. She pressed her palm flat against the cool sheet, and for the first time in seven years, she didn't reach for the phone.