The Art of Falling

The hotel pool was empty at 2 AM, the water still and black as a mirror. Elena sat on the edge, her legs submerged, nursing a gin and tonic she'd carried down from the room upstairs. She checked her phone again—no new messages from Marcus.

She'd been assigned to **spy** on him for three weeks now, buried deep in his department as a "contractor," feeding intel to corporate about the merger he was supposedly negotiating. It was supposed to be straightforward. It always was, until it wasn't.

The pool door clicked open.

"Couldn't sleep either?"

Marcus stood there in his bathrobe, holding two glasses of wine. Elena felt her stomach drop—the same way it had yesterday when he'd laughed at her terrible joke during the meeting, the way it had last week when he'd shown her photos of his daughter's **baseball** game, the kid grinning missing-toothed under a cap that said DAD'S MVP.

"Merger talks keeping you up?" she asked, her voice steady despite everything.

"Something like that." He sat beside her, close enough that their shoulders brushed. "You know what's funny? I played **baseball** in college. Shortstop. Thought I was going pro until my shoulder gave out." He rolled his left shoulder, a habitual gesture she'd noticed during long presentations. "Now I'm just a guy in a suit, pushing papers."

"You're good at it," she said. "The suit part. The papers part. All of it."

"Am I?" He stared at the dark water. "Sometimes I think I'm just playing a part. Like I'm undercover in my own life."

Elena's throat tightened. She knew that feeling. She'd been **spying** on people for twelve years, and somewhere along the way, she'd lost track of who she was when she wasn't watching, waiting, reporting.

"My ex-wife used to say I had this darkness in me," Marcus continued quietly. "Like I was carrying something I couldn't put down. A **bear** on my back, she called it."

"We've all got bears."

"Do we?" He turned to look at her, his eyes searching hers. "Or do we just convince ourselves we're special for having problems?"

Elena set her glass down on the concrete. She should end this conversation. Should go upstairs and finish her report and send it to corporate and disappear like she always did. But she didn't move.

"I think," she said slowly, "that we're all just trying not to drown. Even when we're sitting on the edge of a perfectly nice pool at two AM."

Marcus laughed, a short surprised sound. He reached out, his fingers finding hers in the dark.

"You're different than I thought you were, Elena."

"You have no idea."

But she was already thinking about how much she'd have to delete from her report. How she'd tell her handler that this merger was clean, that Marcus was clean, that she needed a new assignment.

She squeezed his hand and wondered if this was what falling apart was supposed to feel like—or if, impossibly, it was the opposite.