The Signal We Lost

The hotel pool was empty at 3 AM, lit only by the underwater glow that turned everything the color of bruises. Elena sat on the edge, legs dangling in the tepid water, clutching her iphone like it was the last emergency flare on a sinking ship. Three missed calls. Two texts she couldn't bring herself to read.

She'd left her hat on the lounge chair—a wide-brimmed thing she'd bought to hide from the sun, from cameras, from herself. Now it looked like a discarded shell, something she'd outgrown.

The coiled cable at her hip was a paradox. It connected her to everyone she'd ever known, everyone she might become, but it couldn't bridge the three feet of hotel balcony where David lay sleeping, cocooned in the distance that had grown between them like a tumor, quiet and malignant.

They'd come here to fix things. Or at least, that's what they'd told each other. But some fractures don't heal; they just scar over, thick and ugly beneath the surface.

Her phone buzzed again—a familiar vibration that traveled up her arm, straight to her throat.

*You awake?*

It wasn't David.

The cable connecting her to this other possibility, this parallel life she could step into like a warm bath, felt impossibly heavy. She looked at her reflection in the dark water—her own ghost staring back, suspended in that unnatural blue, asking the question she'd been dodging for months: *What are you waiting for?*

Elena pulled the cable from her phone. The screen went dark. The water rippled as she slid in, clothes and all, letting herself sink beneath the surface, holding her breath in the quiet, weightless and finally, terrifyingly free.