The Weight of What Remains

Maya stood at the edge of the pool where Elena had drowned three years ago, the water an unnerving shade of turquoise in the desert sunlight. She clutched Elena's favorite sun hat—a ridiculous, oversized thing with a silk flower that had always made Maya roll her eyes—and waited for something to happen. For closure, maybe. For the wave of grief to finally crest and break.

They hadn't been speaking when Elena died. A workplace betrayal involving a promotion Maya had deserved, Elena had taken, and then Elena had apologized too late, too softly, over drinks that neither woman really wanted to be consuming. Maya had left without saying goodbye. That was the last time they'd spoken.

Now Maya was the one who'd inherited Elena's condo by default, the executor of a will that hadn't been updated since their twenties, back when they were each other's emergency contacts and assumed they always would be. She was supposed to scatter Elena's ashes somewhere meaningful. The pool seemed too literal, too on-the-nose, but here she was anyway.

A man in the neighboring unit appeared at his patio door, maybe forty, attractive in a tired way. "You're the executor, right? The friend from college?"

"Something like that," Maya said.

"She talked about you. When she'd had too much wine. Said you were the person who knew her version of the story."

Maya looked down at the hat, at the water that had taken Elena. The years between them had felt so vast when Elena was alive. Now they just felt like time. Wasted time.

"I didn't know the end of it," Maya said. "Neither of us did."

The man nodded, like this made sense to him, and went back inside, leaving Maya alone with the water and the hat and the silence that had existed between two women who had once loved each other enough to destroy each other. She slipped the hat onto her head. It was too big, sliding down over her eyes, and she understood suddenly that forgiveness wasn't about forgetting. It was about carrying the weight of what remained.