The Summer We Started Walking

The prescription bottle sat on the kitchen counter—vitamin D supplements, the doctor said. For the bone pain. Mark stared at it, remembering how Sarah used to line up their pills every morning with military precision. That was before she started sleeping in the guest room.

He walked outside to the pool, its surface still and unnatural. The neighbors' dog barked at something in the woods—a bear, probably. They'd seen one last summer, lumbering through the backyard like it owned everything. Mark had found himself jealous of that bear, of its lack of mortgage payments and failed expectations.

Inside, the baseball game droned on TV. He'd stopped watching, really. Just background noise now. They'd met at a game fifteen years ago, both reaching for the same dropped foul ball. She'd laughed, her hair catching the stadium lights. He'd proposed two years later in those same stands.

Now Sarah moved through the house like a zombie, eyes glazed, going through motions. Not the eating-brains kind—the married-too-long kind. That's when love doesn't die so much as it forgets to wake up.

"You're staring at the pool again," she said from the sliding glass door.

"Just thinking."

"About what?"

"About how we used to swim at night," he said. "Remember? When we'd sneak into the community pool after hours?"

She didn't answer. The silence stretched between them like a physical thing, heavy and suffocating.

"I started taking the vitamins," he said instead.

"Good." She paused. "I saw a bear this morning. By the compost pile."

"Yeah?"

"It looked at me like I was the one invading its space. Like it belonged here more than we do."

Mark nodded. They were both trespassers in their own life, two ghosts haunting the marriage they'd built. The baseball crowd cheered on TV, celebrating something that had already happened, somewhere far away.

"Do you still love me?" he asked.

She didn't answer. She just watched the pool, its surface like a mirror they both avoided looking into.

"I don't know," she said finally. "I think I forgot how to tell the difference between loving and just not leaving."

The bear in the woods screamed then, a sound like something being torn apart. In that moment, Mark understood exactly how it felt.