Silence in the Water

Emma watched the goldfish drift through the hotel pond, their orange scales flashing like tiny, forgotten promises. Breakfast was a halved papaya, glistening with lime, the kind of breakfast you ate when you were trying to feel like yourself again.

David's phone buzzed against the poolside table. A cable news producer from DC was on the line—another crisis that couldn't wait until Monday. Their tenth anniversary trip to Costa Rica had already been compromised three times since Friday.

"I have to take this," he said, not meeting her eyes.

Emma nodded, the familiar heaviness settling in her chest. This was their new rhythm: him tethered to work by cables no one else could see, and her learning to exist in the spaces between his absences.

She thought about the papaya—how its sweetness was always undercut by something faintly musky, like decay pretending to be luxury. Like their marriage, maybe. The kind of luxury you couldn't afford anymore.

"Thirty minutes," he'd said that morning. "Then we'll play padel."

He'd discovered the sport six months ago, suddenly obsessed with the court near his office. Padel was everything David loved: competitive, social, performative. Emma had tried to learn it, truly she had, but standing in that enclosed court with its glass walls and electric lighting, she felt like a specimen under observation.

The goldfish rose to the surface, mouths opening and closing in silent O's. She envied them sometimes—the way they could exist in such small spaces without ever wondering if there was something more.

Her phone lit up with a text from him, sent from across the table: *Emerg situation. Back in an hour.*

Emma speared a piece of papaya. It was perfectly ripe, sweet enough to make her teeth ache. She chewed slowly, watching the fish, and wondered if some marriages were like them—beautiful to watch from the outside, but circling the same narrow dimensions until the water went cloudy.

The cable guy from DC laughed in the background. Emma finished her papaya and ordered another mimosa. If she was going to drown, she might as well do it with bubbles in her blood.