The Correction

She checked her iPhone for the third time that minute.

Still nothing from him.

The bull market had been raging for six months when Marcus stopped coming home. First the late nights, then the weekends, then the text messages that stopped making sense—half-formed excuses about volatility and quarterly projections and clients who didn't exist. Sarah had seen it in his eyes first: that glazed, hollow look, like someone else was operating his body from a remote location.

"You're being paranoid," he'd said the last time they spoke, thumbing through his iPhone like it was a holy text. "This is what success looks like. You wouldn't understand."

Her cat, a ragged orange tom named Elvis, butted his head against her ankle. Elvis had been Marcus's cat originally, a rescue from a shelter parking lot, something about needing to save something to feel like a man. Now Elvis only looked at Sarah that way—like she was the only solid thing in a world gone liquid.

The worst part wasn't that he'd left. It was that he'd become something else entirely—something that moved through meetings and cocktail parties and high-stakes negotiations without actually being there. A zombie in Italian wool, doing zombie things with zombie people, trading zombie assets in a bull market that everyone knew was fake but nobody wanted to admit.

Sarah had seen the photos on Instagram. Marcus at clubs, Marcus on boats, Marcus surrounded by people who looked like they'd been carved from the same synthetic material. All of them doing their best impressions of humans who felt things.

The iPhone lit up again.

Not Marcus. It was a notification from her investment app. Her portfolio was down 14 percent in the last week. The bull was stumbling. The correction was coming.

She deleted the app. Then she opened her contacts, found Marcus's name—still listed under the pet name she'd given him freshman year of college—and deleted that too.

Elvis jumped onto the bed, circling three times before settling into the warm curve beside her hip. His purr started low, vibrating through the mattress and into her bones. Real. This was real.

The zombie could keep his bull market. She'd rather be here, in the quiet, with something alive.