Sunday at the Empty Pool

The condominium pool lay still and turquoise—closed for the season, though the weather refused to acknowledge it. Sarah stood at the edge, her bare toes curling against the concrete, clutching a glass of white wine she'd been nursing for forty-five minutes. Inside the apartment, the dinner party was reaching that dangerous crescendo where laughter tips toward cruelty.

She'd come with Julian. They'd been together three years, living together two, and somehow she'd never noticed how his laugh changed around his colleagues—sharper, performative. Or maybe she had noticed, and the spinach stuck in his teeth during last year's office holiday party should've been the metaphor she couldn't unsee.

"There you are."

She turned to find Elena, Julian's boss, standing in the sliding glass doorway. A woman whose life seemed meticulously curated, like the hat perched on her head at an outdoor event in mid-October. Indoor-appropriate. Thoughtful.

"Needed air," Sarah said.

Elena joined her at the pool's edge. "Julian's been promoted."

The words landed like stones. "He didn't tell me."

"He's doing the European division. Relocating in January."

Sarah's wine glass sweated in her palm. January was two months away. "He's moving to Europe?"

"We thought you knew."

Thought I knew.

Her phone buzzed—a text from her mother: "Your father put the dog down today. It was time." Tears stung her eyes, sudden and hot. The dog, a golden retriever named Buster, had been her childhood companion. Sixteen years of uncomplicated devotion.

"I have to go," Sarah said.

"He'll be upset if you leave before—"

"Let him."

She set her wine glass on a patio table and walked toward the parking lot. Somewhere in the complex, a cat screamed—mating season or territorial dispute, something primal and violent under the moonlight. The sound followed her to her car, where she sat for a long time before realizing she wasn't crying about the dog, or the promotion, or any single thing. She was crying about the spinach. The tiny, obvious thing she'd refused to see.

The pool reflected the first stars as she drove away, leaving behind the party, the job, the man who'd already begun his life in another timezone without her.