The Last Summer

Elena adjusted the brim of her sun hat, though the shade offered no relief from what waited inside their beachfront villa. The hat had been David's purchase—a cream-colored monstrosity with a silk ribbon that cost more than her first car. Another thing he'd chosen for her.

She found him on the balcony, watching guests swimming in the infinity pool below. The way they moved through turquoise water—graceful, unburdened—made her chest ache. When had they last touched each other like that? Without calculation, without keeping score?

"They're playing baseball on the beach," David said, not turning around. "Remember when we used to play?"

Elena remembered. She remembered everything. The summer they'd met, his baseball cap backwards, sliding into home plate and laughing like the game meant something. Twenty years of memory compressed into that image.

"David, we need to talk about December."

He turned then. In the palm of his hand, he held a tumbler of whiskey, ice melting. His eyes were tired, the same eyes she'd trusted with everything. But trust, she'd learned, was just another word for

expectation.

"The partnership," he said quietly. "You want out."

"We want out," she corrected. "Both of us. We're just too cowardly to say it."

They'd built an empire together, a marketing agency that dominated the Midwest. But somewhere along the way, they'd stopped building anything real. Their marriage had become like wilted spinach—once vibrant, now just something to tolerate on the plate.

"I'll draw up the papers," he said, setting down the glass. "But first, dinner?"

"Dinner," she agreed.

They would eat, they would sleep in separate rooms, and tomorrow they would begin again. Not as strangers, but as something more complicated: people who knew exactly how to hurt each other, and chose not to. That, she decided, was its own kind of love.