The Weight of Wet Things

The chlorine stung her eyes, but she kept swimming. Lap after lap, until her muscles burned and her hair pooled like wet ink around her in the water.

Up on the lounge chair, the iPhone buzzed again—a third message from "E" with an orange heart emoji.

She'd been married for seventeen years. She knew his passcode.

She shouldn't have looked. That was the first truth. The second was that she did anyway, treading water in the center of the hotel pool while reading text messages that made her chest hollow out. A lifetime reduced to pixelated words: "miss your hair" and "can't stop thinking about Tuesday" and the orange emoji, over and over, orange like the fruit wedge floating forgotten in her melting drink.

"You okay?" Mark called from the poolside. He was holding two fresh cocktails, squinting against the sun. "You've been at it for an hour."

She pulled herself from the water, streaming wet, and reached for the oversized sun hat she'd bought specially for this trip. The straw brim created a convenient shadow over her face. A costume, really, for the version of herself she'd been trying to inhabit—the woman who took romantic getaways, who still believed in second chances, who hadn't already checked out of her own marriage six months ago.

"Just needed to stretch my legs," she said, and the lie came so easily that it frightened her. How many lies had she told herself? How many more could she still tell?

Mark kissed her forehead, tasting like sunscreen and rum. "Brought you another Screwdriver. Little heavy on the orange juice this time, just how you like it."

She took the glass. The orange slice on the rim was already drying at the edges, curling into itself like a dying thing.

"Perfect," she said.

What she meant was: I'm done pretending this is working. What she meant was: I'm leaving you, but not today. Today I'll swim and drink this too-sweet cocktail and let you believe everything is fine, because I'm not ready for the conversation yet. I'm not ready for the look on your face when you realize I know about the orange lipstick on your collar last Tuesday, about how you've been swimming laps around the truth for months, about how I stopped touching your hair because it stopped feeling like mine.

"Love you," he said, and the words hung between them like held breath.

She watched a bead of condensation slide down the glass, through the pulp of the orange, down to her thumb. "I know," she said, and wondered if he could hear that she meant something else entirely.