The Geometry of Leaving

Mara pressed her palm against the hotel window, watching the lightning fork across the Cairo skyline like cracks in a broken foundation. Thirty-two years of marriage reduced to this: a view of the Great Pyramid from room 412, and David asleep in the bed behind her, snoring with the comfortable rhythm of a man who had never questioned his choices.

She touched her hair—silver now, not the auburn that had caught David's eye in that college library. The dye stopped covering it two years ago, around the time she stopped pretending to be the woman he thought he'd married.

*You're like a fox,* he had told her once, early on. *All instinct and fire.* She had been flattered then. Now she wondered if he meant: unpredictable. Not to be trusted. Something that requires containment.

The memory came unbidden: last night, floating in the hotel pool, swimming laps beneath a moon so bright it cast shadows on the tile. She had stopped mid-stroke, treading water while David dozed on a lounge chair, and realized she was practicing what it would feel like to keep herself afloat alone.

The pyramid glowed in the distance, that impossible geometry built by thousands of hands pressing stone upon stone. She thought about the women entombed beside pharaohs—necessary, beloved, ultimately secondary to monuments of ego.

Behind her, David stirred. 'Come back to bed, Mare.'

She turned from the window. The lightning had passed, leaving the sky empty and starless.

'In a minute,' she said. And meant: never.