The Electric Blue Moment

The fluorescent lights hummed above Elena as she sat in the doctor's office, her leg bouncing. A routine checkup that now felt like a verdict. The doctor had prescribed her a new vitamin regimen—something about bone density, something about turning forty-seven and her body no longer being the invincible vessel she'd taken for granted.

She thought of Lucas then. How he used to run his fingers through her hair while they lay in bed, his palm against her scalp, before his hands started wandering elsewhere—or more precisely, to someone else entirely. Three months since she found the texts. Three months since she asked him to leave, and still she couldn't bring herself to change the locks.

Outside, lightning cracked the sky open, illuminating the waiting room in harsh flashes. The other patients—elderly, infirm, resigned—barely looked up from their magazines. Elena watched the rain streak down the windows, remembering how she and Lucas had gone swimming in that cove in Croatia, the year they still loved each other. The water had been black and mysterious, and she'd floated on her back, salt stinging her eyes, believing that happiness was something you could hold in your hands like water, that it wouldn't simply slip through your fingers if you squeezed too hard or not hard enough.

'Ms. Petrovich?' A nurse called from the doorway.

Elena stood. Her legs felt hollow, like reeds. She thought about all the things she'd never said to him—how his silence had been worse than the betrayal, how she'd stopped feeling like herself years ago, how she'd been drowning in plain sight. The vitamin bottle in her purse clinked against her keys. Small things. The things that kept you alive.

She followed the nurse down the hallway, each step a decision she hadn't realized she was making until she was making it. Whatever happened next—whatever the scans showed, whatever she did about Lucas, whatever became of the life she'd built and watched crack like old porcelain—she would meet it on her own two feet. The lightning flashed again, and this time, Elena didn't look away.