The Fox at Sunset

Emma lay by the infinity pool, her iPhone buzzing on the lounge chair like an insistent insect she couldn't bring herself to swat away. Another email from Michael—her husband, not her boss—asking if she'd thought about counseling. She watched the screen light up and fade, light and fade, a pulse of anxiety she'd grown accustomed to ignoring.

She swallowed the vitamin D supplement with lukewarm sparkling water, thinking absurdly about how she'd once believed that if she just took enough vitamins, if she just exercised enough and meditated enough and communicated enough, she could prevent this—this quiet unraveling of a decade.

"You coming?" Marcus called from the padel court below, his racquet raised like a weapon against the sky. The resort's pro instructor, young and tan and devastatingly unburdened by mortgages or failed IVF treatments or the weight of decisions that felt impossible to make. He waved at her enthusiastically. "We need a fourth!"

She almost went. That was the problem—she almost always went along with things.

But then she saw the fox.

It emerged from the landscaping at the edge of the property, its coat burnished copper in the dying light. It moved with that peculiar stillness wild things have, head cocked, watching her across the distance. Not watching Marcus or the court or the other guests. Just her.

Emma stood up, the hat she'd bought to hide her hair—the gray threads that had started appearing after the third miscarriage—slipping from her head. She didn't retrieve it.

The fox held her gaze for what could have been seconds or minutes. In its eyes she saw something that frightened her more than the possibility of ending her marriage, more than the prospect of starting over at forty-two, more than the silence that awaited her back in their Chicago apartment.

Recognition.

Then it turned and slipped back into the shadows, gone as quickly as it had appeared.

Emma picked up her phone. There were three new messages from Michael. She typed a response—something honest, something that had been sitting in her chest like a stone for months—and pressed send before she could think herself out of it.

Marcus was still waving from below, growing impatient now. "Emma?"

She watched her phone screen brighten with his reply. Not a question. An answer.

"I'm done playing," she whispered to the empty air, and finally, finally began to pack her bag.