Swimming with the Fox

The vitamin supplements sat on his nightstand — amber bottles lined up like soldiers. D3, B12, Omega-3. He never took vitamins before her. Before the affair.

Elena watched him from across the dinner table, pushing spinach around her plate. She'd made his favorite dish, the one with cream and garlic and too much cheese, the way he liked it. He barely touched it.

"You're swimming tomorrow?" she asked, though she already knew the answer.

"Early."

Always early. 5 AM laps at the club pool, forty-five minutes of solitary strokes before work. That's when he'd started taking the vitamins. That's when his phone became password-protected, screen down on the table like a guilty secret.

A month ago, driving home from her sister's house, Elena had seen him. Not at the pool. Coming out of a building downtown, some woman's hand on his arm. He'd been laughing — really laughing, the way he used to laugh with her, before the mortgage and the miscarriage and five years of comfortable silences.

She'd turned into a different person that night. A spy in her own marriage. Checking his phone when he showered. Memorizing his new passwords. Following him once, two weeks ago, watching from a cafe as he met that woman for lunch.

Now she noticed everything. The way he hummed in the shower — different songs than before. The cologne she hadn't bought him. The fox.

They'd never seen foxes in their subdivision until three weeks ago. A sleek red one, watching from the edge of their backyard at dusk. cunning and beautiful and wrong, like everything else now. He'd pointed it out the first time, standing too close to the window, checking.

"There it is again," he'd said.

Again. Like he'd seen it before. Like he knew why it came.

"You're quiet," he said now, pushing back from the table. His spinach lay untouched.

"Just thinking."

"About?"

About the fox that watches your bedroom window. About the vitamins you started taking when she did. About whether I should say her name or just let you keep swimming laps at dawn while I pretend not to know what you are.

"Work," she said. "Just work."

He nodded, already looking toward the door. Already thinking about tomorrow morning's swim, about the water that held him weightless and clean, about the woman who'd never find spinach in her teeth, who'd never need to know.

Outside, the fox moved along the fence line, hunting.