The Last Message

Mara lay on the lounge chair by the pool, her iphone face down on the small table beside her. The screen had lit up three times in the past hour—work emails, a notification from her dentist, something from Amazon—but she hadn't moved to check. The heat pressed against her skin, oppressive and thick, while palm fronds rustled overhead in a breeze that offered no real relief.

Across the resort, David was probably doing the same thing. Waiting. Staring at his own phone, wondering why she hadn't responded to his text from that morning: *I think we need to talk when I get back.* The message had landed in her inbox like a stone she couldn't lift.

The waiter appeared with her lunch—a halved papaya glistening in the sun, its seeds scooped out and replaced with a small scoop of sorbet. It was the kind of decadence they'd once jokingly called 'divorce money' during those broke years in Chicago, back when their biggest problems were which bills to pay first and whether to have children. Now they could afford anything. Everything except each other.

She dipped her spoon into the fruit's orange flesh, remembering how David had surprised her with papaya sorbet on their fifth anniversary, the one they'd spent at that shitty rooftop bar in Wicker Park because they couldn't afford a real trip. He'd saved for weeks to buy her that $8 dessert. The sweetness had made her cry then, for reasons she still couldn't articulate—not happiness exactly, but something like relief. Someone had seen her. Someone had tried.

The pool's surface rippled in the wind, reflecting nothing but sky and the swaying palms. She'd come here alone to figure out whether to wait for him or pack her things, but three days of silence had done nothing but confirm what she'd known for months. They'd become strangers who shared a bed, a mortgage, a history. The intimacy had leaked out slowly, like air from a tire she couldn't be bothered to fix.

Her iphone chimed again.

Mara turned it over. David's name filled the screen, his contact photo showing him grinning on a boat in Lake Michigan three years ago—before the promotion, before the distance, before whatever this was had calcified between them. The screen darkened before she could decide.

She ate the papaya slowly, watching palm shadows stretch across the water. The sorbet melted first, then the fruit itself, until only the hollowed rind remained. When she finally reached for her phone, his notification was gone. Just a lock screen reflecting her own face back at herself—older than she remembered, tired in ways sleep couldn't fix, alone in a way that had everything and nothing to do with being physically by herself.

The phone buzzed once more. Not David. Her boss, asking if she'd reviewed the Q2 projections. She typed a quick yes, stood up, and walked toward the pool's edge, stepping out of her sandals. The water would be cold. That was something, at least.