Still Waters

The pool was supposed to be a selling point of the corporate retreat. Crystal blue water, carefully temperature-controlled, surrounded by tasteful lounge chairs that nobody actually used. Elena sat at the edge, her feet dangling in, watching the ripples distort her reflection.

Her iPhone buzzed against the concrete. Marcus's third message in ten minutes: *We need to talk about the presentation.*

She ignored it.

A fox emerged from the treeline behind the cabanas — a real one, not the clever metaphor her mother used for office schemers. It moved with practiced elegance, nose twitching at the air before vanishing again. Elena had been the fox once, in another life, before her promotion to VP.

Before she'd learned what it meant to bear the weight of other people's mistakes.

The water felt like her career lately: deceptively calm on the surface, but underneath, currents were pulling her under. Yesterday's email had confirmed it. The quarterly projections she'd championed, the ones Marcus had promised to triple-check, were wrong. Not just wrong — catastrophically, career-endingly wrong.

She'd worked eighty-hour weeks for three years. Her mother had died while she was on a conference call. Her marriage had dissolved into text messages about groceries and who'd remember to feed the cat. And now this.

Her phone lit up again. *Everyone knows. Helen's asking questions.*

Elena stood up, water dripping from her legs. She thought about her twenty-year-old self, who'd believed competence was armor. She thought about the phrase her father had used: *Still waters run deep.*

What he'd never said was that sometimes, still waters were just dead.

She picked up her iPhone, scrolled to Marcus's contact, and typed: *Tell Helen we'll meet at 9. You bring the corrected numbers. I bring the receipts.*

Then she deleted the message, blocked his number, and walked back toward the main building, leaving small wet footprints on the concrete that would evaporate before anyone noticed they'd been there at all.