The Pool of Candidates

The backyard pool glowed orange in the sunset, the same color as the sunset that had burned over the baseball field when she was seventeen, when life still felt like something that happened to you rather than something you watched yourself endure from behind glass.

"You're zoning out again, Marcus said from across the padel court. He was twenty-eight, devastatingly handsome in that way venture capital guys always were, and somehow still believed that enthusiasm was a personality trait. The ball slammed into the fence.

Elena blinked. She was thirty-four, and some days she felt less like a person and more like a zombie wearing a suit—a corporate undead, shambling through meetings and networking events, hungry for something she couldn't name.

"Sorry," she said. "Long week."

"The merger," he nodded sympathetically. "I hear the pool of candidates for the new VP position is brutal. They're chewing people up and spitting them out."

The pool. The phrase caught in her throat. Three years ago, she'd been in that pool—bright, hungry, convinced this was the summit she'd been climbing toward her whole life. Now she stood in the orange evening light, racquet in hand, watching someone else live the life she'd thought she wanted, and the terrible truth was that she couldn't remember what she'd sacrificed to get here, only that she'd lost something essential in the process.

"Marcus," she said, and he turned, waiting. The orange light caught the sharp angles of his face, the confidence that hadn't yet been eroded by a decade of compromise. "I think I'm done with the pool."

"What?"

"I don't want to be in the pool anymore. I don't want to be in the game. I think I'd rather just—" she gestured vaguely at the court, the pool, the careful curation of a life built around staying valuable enough to be chosen.

His face softened. "You want to get dinner? There's that orange tree in the parking lot. We could sit on the curb and pretend we're twenty-one again."

For the first time in three years, the zombie in the suit felt something like waking up. "Yes," she said. "God, yes."