The Riddle by the Pool

The palm tree cast a jagged shadow across Meredith's face as she lay by the pool, sunglasses hiding the fact that she'd been crying for twenty minutes. Her iPhone buzzed against the chaise lounge—Mark again. Always Mark.

"You okay?" The voice belonged to Elena, a friend from college who'd become something more complicated during this disastrous girls' trip to Cabo. Something that involved tequila and 3am confessions and now this terrible, heavy silence between them.

Meredith lifted her sunglasses. "Mark wants to know why I changed the flight."

"Do you want to tell him?" Elena sat on the edge of Meredith's chair, her thigh brushing Meredith's calf. The contact was electric, terrifying.

"That I realized halfway through the ceremony that I don't love him? That I've been in love with my best friend for six years and never let myself admit it?" Meredith laughed bitterly. "That should go over well."

Elena's hand found Meredith's, palm against palm. "Mer. You didn't just realize it. We both did."

"And what? We're supposed to what?" She gestured at the pool, where tourists laughed and splashed, oblivious to the quiet catastrophe occurring ten feet away. "Drop everything? You're still married to David. I'm still wearing Mark's ring, technically."

"David's moving out next week." Elena's voice was barely audible. "I just haven't told anyone yet."

Meredith went still. The sphinx of Elena's face—so composed, so unreadable these past years—suddenly cracked open. All those riddles she'd never asked. All those answers she'd never given.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because I was terrified you'd say: 'Too late, I chose Mark.'" Elena's thumb traced the lifeline on Meredith's palm. "But you didn't choose him, did you? Not really."

The iPhone buzzed again. Mark. Always Mark, until suddenly he wasn't. Until the choice had already been made, ripped from Meredith's hands like something she'd never really been holding.

She turned off the phone.

"David's a good man," Meredith said quietly.

"He is." Elena's eyes were devastatingly honest. "He's just not the one."

The pool's surface rippled in the wind, fracturing Meredith's reflection into pieces that couldn't quite come back together. Somewhere between the cabana and the ceremony, between who she was supposed to be and who she actually was, something fundamental had shifted.

She squeezed Elena's hand. "So what do we do now?"

Elena smiled, tentative and terrified and entirely alive. "We start over?"

Meredith looked at her palm, still pressed against Elena's. The future, she realized, was something they got to write themselves—not something that happened to them.

"Yes," she said. "Let's."