The Lightning Strike

Margaret stood before the bathroom mirror, pulling a silver strand of hair from her temple. Three more today. The corporate pyramid she'd spent twenty years climbing felt suddenly vertiginous, the air thin at the top where she'd finally perched as VP of Operations.

Her phone buzzed again — David's third text this hour. *We need to talk.* The words she'd been bearing like stones in her pocket for weeks.

Outside, lightning fractured the sky, illuminating the framed photograph on her vanity. Her daughter, age seven, grinning with missing front teeth on a camping trip. That weekend they'd seen a bear at the edge of their campsite, and Margaret had held her breath, terrified, until the animal lumbered away.

Some fears you outgrow. Others you cultivate.

She sprayed dry shampoo on her roots — the stylist called it 'camouflaging the inevitable' — and smoothed the expensive blazer that felt like a costume. Tonight was the anniversary gala. Black tie, open bar, the same carefully curated conversations about market share and synergies while pretending not to notice who was sleeping with whom.

David would be there with his new assistant, the one whose hair swung like silk when she laughed.

Another lightning strike flashed, closer now. The mirror trembled in its frame.

Margaret remembered her daughter's question from that camping trip: *Mommy, what do bears do when they're scared?*

*They keep going,* she'd said. *They just keep going.*

Her phone lit up with a fourth message: *Please. Five minutes.*

Margaret set the phone on the counter, turned off the bathroom light, and walked toward the bedroom where her evening dress waited. The pyramid could wait. The lightning would pass. And somewhere beyond all this, there were still wild things that knew how to survive a storm.