The Drowning Screen

The water ran cold before Maya remembered to turn off the faucet. She stood there, hands trembling under the stream, watching her reflection distort in the bathroom mirror. Another day running on empty.

Her iPhone buzzed against the counter—him again. The sixth call tonight. She should block him. She knew she should block him.

Maya grabbed the bottle of vitamin D supplements from the medicine cabinet. The doctor had prescribed them last winter, saying she needed more light in her life. God, the irony. She swallowed two dry pills with tap water.

The phone lit up with a text: *I still have your sweater.*

It had been three months since she caught him running back to his ex. Two months since she'd stopped crying in the office bathroom. One month since she'd started feeling like maybe she'd survive.

And now this.

Maya's thumb hovered over the screen. She could ask him to mail it. She could tell him to burn it. She could block him and never think about that cashmere sweater again.

Instead, she typed: *Keep it.*

Then she deleted his number.

The water was still running. Maya turned it off and stood in the sudden silence, listening to the pipes settling in the walls. She was thirty-four years old, successful by any reasonable metric, and yet here she was, making a victory out of telling a man who'd broken her heart to keep her damn sweater.

She laughed. It wasn't happy, but it was genuine.

Tomorrow she'd buy a new sweater. Tomorrow she'd start running again, like she used to before her life became about making someone else happy. Tomorrow she'd call her mother and maybe even take those vitamins properly.

Tonight, Maya turned off all the lights and crawled into bed alone, feeling something shift inside her chest—like water finding its level.