The Call at Sunset

Mara sat at the edge of the hotel pool, legs dangling in the water that had turned the color of a dying sunset—orange and pink and impossibly still. She'd been waiting two hours. Her iPhone buzzed again, displaying his name for the third time this morning: *The Fox*. That's what everyone called Mark at the firm. Clever, elusive, always one step ahead.

She remembered the baseball game where it started—the company outing last summer. Mark had bought her a drink, his expensive cologne competing with the smell of cheap beer and cut grass. "You're not like the others," he'd said, and at thirty-eight, married twelve years, Mara had wanted desperately to believe she was still someone who could be not like the others.

Now she watched the pool's surface ripple as someone dove in—a stranger, just another body in another city. Mark was supposed to meet her here. Another departure, another promise, another secret.

Her phone lit up again. Not Mark. It was her husband, David. *Picked up the tickets. Flight's at 7. Can't wait to see you.*

Mara pressed the phone against her chest, remembering why she'd come. Not to run away with Mark, who'd already proven himself unreliable twice before. She'd come to remember who she used to be. The woman who loved David, who built a life, who didn't need to be chosen by men like foxes—always hunting, never caught.

She typed back: *Me neither. On my way.*

Mara stood up, water dripping from her legs, and left without looking back at the pool, or the phone that showed Mark's missed call, or the orange-streaked sky that had seemed, for a few hours, like the beginning of something new instead of the end of something that had never really existed at all.