Supplements by the Pool

Maya sits on the edge of the infinity pool, legs submerged in the chlorinated water that catches the last light of day. Above her, palm fronds rustle in the breeze that smells like coconut sunscreen and something else—something like the particular stillness that comes before an ending.

She'd been swimming laps for forty minutes when her phone buzzed on the lounge chair. Not a text. A calendar notification: "Dinner with Daniel — 7th Anniversary." She'd forgotten. Or maybe she hadn't forgotten at all.

The vitamin supplements she takes each morning sit in a terra cotta dish on the nightstand back in their room—Vitamin D for the mood she can't seem to fix, magnesium for the sleep that won't come, B-complex for the energy she used to have naturally. A pharmacopeia for a marriage that stopped working years ago.

Her iPhone glows now with an incoming call. Daniel's face appears on screen, those familiar hazel eyes crinkling at the corners, the gray hair that used to be brown when they met at that tech conference in Austin. He's probably in some airport somewhere—Chicago, maybe. Or Seattle. The details blur together after this many years of quarterly reviews and strategic planning sessions.

"Hey," she answers, water dripping from her hair onto the screen. "Happy anniversary."

"Maya, listen—" His voice crackles with that particular compression of airport wifi. "The Chicago meeting ran long. I'm stuck until Thursday."

She watches a gecko climb the rough stucco wall beside her. "Thursday."

"I know. I know it's—"

"It's fine, Daniel."

She doesn't say that she came to Cabo alone hoping he would surprise her by showing up. That for months she's been swallowing those vitamins every morning like a prayer, like some secular devotion to the possibility that things could get better, that they could both become different people if they just took the right combination of things.

"I'll make it up to you," he says. "Promise."

She hangs up before she can hear the rest. The sun sinks below the horizon, painting the sky in bruising shades of violet and gray. She slides fully into the pool, lets the water close over her head, holds herself in the silence that isn't silent at all—the muffled rush of her own heartbeat, a palm frong scraping against the wind, the persistent vibration of her phone on dry land above her, summoning her back to a life she no longer knows how to want.