Surface Tension

The pool shimmered like a wound in the landscape, its chlorinated blue reflecting a sky too perfect to be real. Elena lay on the lounger, her marriage dissolving in the heat like ice in a glass. Three weeks at this luxury resort, paid for with vacation days Thomas couldn't spare, padel lessons every morning while she stared at ceilings and wondered when they'd stopped having anything to say to each other.

A cat — scrawny, orange, uninterested in their pampering — skulked around the resort perimeter. Thomas had laughed when he first saw it, making some joke about stray animals and their nine lives. He always made jokes when things mattered. Last night, after too much wine, he'd told her he wasn't happy. Hadn't been for years. The words had hovered between them like smoke, impossible to grasp but impossible to ignore.

Their dog back home, Buster, would be at her sister's house. She imagined him waiting by the door, not understanding why his people had left him. Buster, who still slept curled against her feet even though Thomas said thirty was too old for a dog in the bed. Buster, who loved them both with a loyalty their marriage had lost somewhere along the line.

She watched from the window as Thomas destroyed some poor kid on the padel court, his back to her, swinging with that fierce precision he applied to everything except their relationship. The glass walls of the court reflected the pool, the sky, her own hollowed-out face looking back at her.

The orange cat jumped onto her balcony, regarding her with ancient, indifferent eyes. Some truths, Elena realized, you had to name yourself. She stood up, grabbed her packed bag from the closet, and left without watching the match end.