The Fox at the Poolside

The corporate retreat was her idea. 'Team building,' Elena had called it, though the only thing being built was the wall between us. I watched her from the lounge chair, gripping my padel racquet like a weapon I didn't know how to use. She laughed at something Mark from Accounting said — head thrown back, throat exposed, vulnerable in that way she used to be only with me.

A stray cat wound around the pool chairs, gray and skeletal, its ribs visible beneath matted fur. It reminded me of our marriage in the final months: hungry, persistent, beneath dignity. I tossed it a piece of my breakfast croissant. It ate without looking at me.

'You're not even trying,' Elena said later on the padel court. She'd paired me with Mark. 'You're just going through the motions.' She said the same thing the night she moved into the guest room.

'Mark says you're a fox,' she told me that night at the hotel bar, drunk on cheap Chardonnay. 'Clever. But you can't be tamed.' She'd meant it as an insult. Once, she'd said it with wonder, pulling me toward her in the back of a taxi.

Now I watched them across the pool — Mark's hand on her knee, her fingers tracing the condensation on her glass. The water reflected fractured light onto their faces, making them both look like strangers. Or maybe I was the stranger here, the one who'd stopped playing along.

The cat returned at dusk, sat on my windowsill. I opened the curtain. It didn't move. Some things, I realized, would keep coming back regardless of whether you fed them. Some things would scratch at your door forever, waiting for you to let them in or finally, finally, walk away.

I packed before dawn. Left the padel racquet on the bed. Left Elena sleeping in the next room. Outside, the first taxi of morning waited like an apology I'd never meant to make.