The Pool

The betting pool had reached fourteen thousand dollars. That was the number Maya had scribbled on the margin of her meeting notes, right next to the action items for Q4. Forty-seven people in the office had money on when she'd crack.

"Vitamin D deficiency," the doctor had said, pushing the prescription across the desk like it could fix anything. "You're not getting enough sunlight. You're not living."

Living. The word felt foreign. She'd been running—running meetings, running to catch the train, running from the empty apartment she refused to call home—since the divorce. Running in circles, mostly.

At the company retreat, she stood by the pool in her orange sundress, watching her colleagues get drunk on cheap wine and optimism. Someone had organized a volleyball tournament. Another team-building exercise in a series of humiliations disguised as corporate culture. The hat she'd bought to hide her new gray hair sat crooked on her head, a physical manifestation of how she felt about everything: tilted, slightly wrong, but covering up the mess underneath.

"You're not going in?" David asked, appearing beside her with two plastic cups of something that smelled like coconut and poor decisions.

Maya shook her head. "I forgot my suit."

"Liar."

She turned to face him. David from Accounting. David who'd put five hundred on her having a complete breakdown by Thanksgiving. David who was currently looking at her with something that wasn't pity, wasn't amusement, but something in between.

"The pool," he said, gesturing vaguely toward the water where their coworkers were screaming. "About you. I told them to close it."

Maya's chest tightened. "You have money on it."

"Had. I withdrew my bet."

"Why?"

David took a sip of his drink. "Because you're not going to break. Because you're already broken, and somehow you're still functioning anyway, and that's more interesting than watching someone fall apart."

He set the drink down on the concrete edge of the pool. "Also, I found a running group. Tuesday mornings. 6 AM. No talking, just movement. You should come."

Maya looked at him—at the softness in his eyes, at the way he didn't look away. She thought about the orange sunset painting itself across the sky, the way the light made everything look like it was burning, beautiful and doomed. She thought about the vitamin supplements sitting in her kitchen cabinet, promises contained in plastic bottles.

"I don't run," she said.

David smiled, just a little. "Nobody does. Until they have to."