The Pool Where We Drowned

The swimming pool at the apartment complex was empty at 2 AM, which was exactly why Mara went there. The water reflected the security lights in fractured blue patterns, like a mirror trying to remember its original face.

She'd been seeing him for three months—her friend's ex-husband, which everyone agreed was spectacularly messy even by twenty-first century standards. Not messy enough to stop, though. She'd learned that messy was just the price of admission for anything worth feeling.

Her phone buzzed against the concrete where she'd left it. probably him again. Their arrangement had simple rules: no sleepovers, no emotions, no future. He was terrible at following rules.

She slid into the water. It was shocking cold, the kind that makes your breath catch and your skin tighten around your bones. She used to play baseball in college—shortstop, the position of second chances—and this felt like stepping into the batter's box again, that moment where you either swing or you don't, and either way, you have to live with it.

A cat appeared at the pool's edge, a ragged calico with one ear that refused to stand up. It regarded her with the bored judgment of small creatures who've seen humans do inexplicable things for years.

"You're not helping," she told it.

The cat sat down and began washing its face. Mara treaded water, thinking about cable news and how they made everything sound urgent and nothing sound true, how her life felt like that lately—all breaking news with no actual news breaking.

Her friend Sarah had stopped speaking to her when she found out. Sarah, who'd held her hair back when she drank too much in college, who'd sat with her in hospital waiting rooms, who'd known her longer than she'd known herself. Some losses are loud; this one was quiet, like a door clicking shut.

She got out of the pool, dripping and shivering. The cat was still there, watching with that unimpressed stare.

"Fine," she said, wrapping herself in a towel. "You're right. I'll call him."

The cat yawned, showing teeth that looked surprisingly sharp for something so small, and vanished into the darkness like it had never existed at all.

Mara picked up her phone. Three missed calls. One text message that said, simply: I miss you.

She stared at it for a long time before typing back: I know. Me too.

Then she deleted it. Some doors, once opened, can never be closed again. That was the thing about swimming: eventually you have to come up for air, or you have to let the water take you. There was no third option.