The Odds of Remembering

The office betting pool lay spread across Mara's desk like a crime scene—twenty dollars in crumpled bills, a spreadsheet predicting which senior partners would be laid off next. The corporate chopping block, reduced to gambling odds.

"You in?" asked Colin, leaning against her doorway with that easy baseball-player grace that had first drawn her to him three years ago. Now it just made her chest ache.

Mara looked at the spreadsheet. Colin's name was third from the top, odds of departure: 3:1. He didn't know.

"No," she said, turning back to her monitor. "I don't bet on people's lives."

"We used to be better at this," he said softly. "At pretending to care."

That evening, Mara sat by her apartment complex's pool at twilight, the water still and glass-dark. She'd bought a papaya at the international market—the kind of exotic, optimistic purchase she used to make when she believed in new beginnings. The fruit sat on the table between her and a bowl of goldfish crackers, snacks from two different versions of herself.

She thought about the last time she and Colin had come here, drunk on novelty and each other. They'd eaten papaya with spoons, sticky-sweet and messily romantic, and talked about everything except what was happening between them. The pool had been lit blue then, full of daring swimmers and laughter. Now it was just water and silence.

Her phone buzzed. Colin had sent a photo of them from that night—her face pressed against his shoulder, both glowing with the terrifying certainty that this could last forever. No caption.

Mara ate the papaya alone, the flesh soft and bland against her tongue. Some memories were better left uneaten. In the kitchen, her daughter's goldfish circled its bowl endlessly, forgetting the same walls every seven seconds. Maybe that was the real blessing—not memory, but the capacity to be surprised by the same thing, over and over.

The papaya seeds went down the garbage disposal. Colin's odds of leaving the company were better than the odds of them finding their way back to each other. Some games ended in extra innings; others just got rained out before anyone could keep score.