Still Water

The apartment was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and the occasional splash from the pool below — the luxury building's amenity, five stories down, where she'd watched him laugh with a woman in a red dress three nights ago.

Claire stood at the balcony railing, her wine glass sweating in the humidity. She was forty-two, and she had stopped believing in the kind of love that lasted somewhere around the same time she stopped believing her mother would ever be happy again. After her father left, her mother had taken to drowning her sorrows in boxed wine and daytime television, telling anyone who'd listen that men were dogs — not the loyal kind, but the strays who'd eat from your hand then vanish when something better came along.

Marcus was home late again. The third time this week. He walked through the door carrying the scent of other people's perfume and office air, his tie loosened, that practiced smile already forming.

"Rough day," he said, pressing his lips to her forehead. A dry, perfunctory kiss. Like water off a duck's back.

"Was it?" Claire asked. She didn't turn from the balcony.

"You wouldn't believe the bullshit." He laughed, unbothered. That was his word for everything he couldn't explain — the missed dinners, the unanswered texts, the way he'd become a ghost in his own life. "Corporate's riding us hard on the merger. Same old bull, different day."

She remembered their honeymoon in Malta, how they'd swum in the Mediterranean at midnight, how he'd held her in the dark water and whispered that he'd never let her go. Now he couldn't even remember to put his glass in the dishwasher.

"Marcus?"

"Hmm?" He was already scrolling through his phone, thumbs moving like they were trained for something else entirely.

"Do you still love me?"

The question hung there, heavier than it should have been. He looked up, and for a second she saw it — the flicker of annoyance, the calculus of whether this was worth the energy of addressing. That micro-expression she'd learned to read the way traders read market trends.

"Of course I do," he said, and the words sounded like something he'd practiced in mirrors.

Claire turned back to the balcony. Below, someone was doing laps in the pool, cutting through the water with the relentless efficiency of someone who had somewhere else to be. She realized she'd become the person waiting for the swimmer to finish.

"I saw you," she said quietly. "With the woman in the red dress. By the pool."

The silence that followed was complete. Not peaceful — the kind that comes after something has broken beyond repair.

"Claire," he started, and stopped. There was no bull in his voice now. No practiced charm. Just a man realizing his luck had finally run dry.

She finished her wine and set the glass on the railing. "I'm going to stay with Sarah tonight. We can talk when you figure out what you actually want."

She didn't look back. The elevator ride down felt like coming up for air after holding her breath for years.