The Bear in the Orange Light

Elise kept running, though her lungs burned and the Chicago winter gnawed at her exposed skin. Three miles along the lakeshore path, the same route she'd taken for five years, ever since Mark left. The motion had become a meditation, a way to outrun the silence of her apartment.

An orange peel lay on the frozen ground ahead, startlingly bright against the gray slush. She nearly stepped on it before swerving, the motion sudden and violent. That was Mark's favorite fruit, one he'd always eat messily, leaving peels on coasters and bedside tables until she'd find them days later, dried and curling like dying insects.

The first winter after he'd walked out, she'd bought herself a fox coat—real fur, ridiculously expensive, the kind of purchase that felt like defiance. She'd worn it to his office Christmas party, watching him flinch when she walked in. The coat still hung in her closet, a beautiful, terrible thing she couldn't bring herself to wear again.

But tonight was worse. Tonight was the anniversary.

At dinner, her sister had warned her: "You're being a bull about this. Just charging ahead, refusing to feel anything."

Elise had laughed. She couldn't explain how feeling felt like drowning. How the numbness was the only lifeline.

The path curved toward the beach, and she saw him—or thought she did. A bear of a man, broad and dark-haired, standing at the water's edge. But as she approached, the figure resolved into a stranger, just some other insomniac seeking the lake at midnight.

Her phone buzzed. Mark's name lit the screen.

She stopped running. For the first time in five years, she stood still on the path, breathing hard, her heart hammering against her ribs. The orange peel behind her, the fox coat at home, the bull-headed determination that had sustained her through endless nights—all of it suddenly felt like someone else's life.

The bear in the orange light of the streetlamp was only her own shadow, stretched long and impossible across the sand.

Elise answered the phone.