The Weight of Water

The pool stretched before her, that impossible turquoise that exists only in places where real life has been edited out. Lena sat on the lounge chair, watching Marcus play padel with what's-her-name from accounting. The rhythmic *thwack* of the ball against the glass walls—so different from tennis, more enclosed, more intentional.

They'd come to Cabo to fix things. Or that's what Marcus had said, three months ago when he'd booked the trip, back when he still looked at her like she was a person he wanted to know. Now she watched him laugh at something the woman said, his head tilted back, throat exposed. That gesture used to be hers.

"You look like a zombie," her friend Sarah had told her over drinks last week. "You're just... shuffling through it." Sarah didn't know about the miscarriage. Sarah didn't know about the months of silence that had followed, the way their bedroom had become a place of avoidance rather than intimacy.

Lena had been running from the truth for eight months. Running from the ultrasound tech's face. Running from Marcus's careful, terrible neutrality. Running from the fact that the woman she'd been—the one who laughed easily, who made plans, who believed—had died somewhere in a sterile room with a monitor showing nothing.

Marcus came off the court, sweating and radiant. He waved at her, then hesitated, something flickering across his face. Recognition, maybe. Or guilt.

"Join us?" he called. "It's actually kind of fun."

The woman from accounting stood behind him, smiling that polite stranger smile.

Lena stood up, her body heavy with the weight of days. She thought about the pool behind her—how easy it would be to just sink. But instead she walked toward them, toward the court where people played while other people watched, toward the possibility that somewhere beneath all the grief and distance, something was still alive.

"Next round," she said, and Marcus's face transformed, just for a second, into something almost like hope.