The Architecture of Loss

The resort pool glowed that artificial turquoise that exists nowhere in nature. Elena floated on her back, swimming laps in slow meditative circles, while Marcus sat at the swim-up bar nursing something pink with an orange slice that had gone brown at the edges.

"You're missing the sunset," he said, not really looking at her. The sky was doing that dramatic thing it does in expensive places—painting itself in bruised purples and burning oranges as if putting on a show just for them. Or for the Instagram stories they'd stopped posting three months ago.

Elena pulled herself to the bar's edge. Water dripped from her hair onto the stone counter. "I saw the pyramids today," she said. "The Mayan ones. The guide kept talking about how they built upward toward the heavens, layer by layer, how each level supported the next." She paused. "Relationships are supposed to work like that."

Marcus swirled his drink. The ice clinked against the glass. "Instead of what?"

"Instead of like padel."

He'd played earlier with some venture capitalists from Denver—friendly enough strangers who didn't know about the late nights at the office, the carefully orchestrated distance, the way they'd become experts at appearing in the same photographs without ever quite touching. Padel was like tennis but contained, walled in on all sides, the ball always bouncing back.

"You hit it, it comes back," she continued. "You hit it again. Nothing gets resolved. You're just keeping the ball in play."

"I could teach you," he offered, and she almost laughed at the automatic way he tried to fix things with solutions when the problem wasn't about solutions at all.

"Marcus." She said his name like it was something she'd been practicing in her head. "I'm not swimming anymore. I'm just treading water."

He looked at her then—really looked—at the way the water made her skin glisten, at the gray hairs she'd stopped dyeing, at the eyes that had seen too many of the same sunsets in too many of these beautiful places that were supposed to fix what was broken between them.

The orange slice slipped off his glass and sank into the pool.

"I know," he said. "Me too."