The Blue Hour at the Tropicana

Margaret floated on her back in the hotel pool at sunset, the water buoying her forty-eight-year-old body in a way gravity no longer did. The evening sky turned that particular bruised purple that exists only in the tropics—the color of a plum about to rot, or a bruise that's healing wrong.

She could see Richard on their balcony, silhouetted against the sliding glass door. His face illuminated by the blue glow of his iPhone, thumbs moving in that familiar obsessive rhythm. For three days of their anniversary trip, he'd been responding to "urgent" work emails. Margaret had stopped asking what was so urgent. She already knew: nothing. The same corporate bullshit that had drained the life out of him for two decades.

She touched the pocket of her swimsuit where she'd hidden the prenatal vitamins she'd started taking secretly. A foolish, desperate gesture at forty-eight. She'd had a dream last week—a vivid, terrible dream of holding a baby with Richard's cleft chin, waking to find her pillow soaked with tears and her body aching with a phantom weight. The vitamins were placebo magic, a middle-aged woman's version of a child's prayer.

"You coming in?" Richard called from the balcony, phone still in hand.

"Soon."

"There's a bull market on fertility stocks," he said, apropos of nothing. "I was reading—"

She dipped her head underwater, letting the silence swallow her words. In the muffled blue world beneath the surface, she imagined staying there forever, becoming something else entirely. Something that didn't need vitamins, didn't need phones, didn't need to pretend this marriage was anything other than exhausted.

When she surfaced, gasping, Richard was gone from the balcony. The sliding door was closed. Inside, the TV flickered—some financial news program, charts and graphs climbing toward invisible ceilings.

Margaret climbed the pool ladder, water streaming off her body like she was being reborn, or like she was melting. She understood now that love was just a series of accumulated disappointments you learned to carry. Some days it felt lighter than others. Tonight, it felt like carrying water in her arms.

She would go inside, take her vitamin, and lie beside him in the dark. They would wake tomorrow and do this again. That was the promise, and the punishment, of growing old together.