The Art of Treading Water

The papaya sat untouched on the breakfast plate, its orange flesh weeping into the crater of halved fruit. Martin had always loved it—the way the seeds clung like black pearls to the center—but Elena couldn't stomach it today. Couldn't stomach much of anything since the phone call three mornings ago.

She swam alone in the resort pool at dawn, breaststroke methodical and slow, the water holding her in a way her marriage no longer could. Her friend Rachel kept texting—*You okay? Call me*—but Elena had stopped responding. What was there to say? That she'd discovered her husband of twelve years had been living a double life? That the baseball stadium seats they'd shared for a decade—those season tickets she'd thought were their sanctuary—had become the stage for his other life?

A palm frond brushed her shoulder as she pulled herself from the water. She'd insisted on coming to St. Lucia alone. Martin had begged to come, to fix it, to explain. But explanations were just stories people told themselves to make the unbearable bearable.

She lay on the chaise, watching a couple play volleyball in the shallows. They laughed, splashed, moved together with the easy familiarity of newlyweds or long-marrieds who'd never stopped trying. Elena pressed her palm against her chest, feeling nothing where her heart used to be.

The papaya beckoned. She took a bite, sweet and earthy against her tongue. Martin had hated papaya. Called it "overripe musk." She'd ordered it every morning of their honeymoon just to watch him wrinkle his nose, dramatic and endearing.

That was the thing about grief: it didn't arrive whole. It came in fragments—the empty half of the bed, the phantom ring of a cold beer can on the nightstand, the papaya she'd ordered from spite and now couldn't stop eating.

Her phone buzzed. Rachel again. Then a message from Martin: *I'm staying at the airport hotel. Please let me explain.*

Elena deleted it without reading and slipped back into the water, swimming toward the deep end where she could no longer touch bottom. Sometimes the only way to stay afloat was to stop fighting the current and simply learn to breathe underwater.