The Weight of What We Carry

The lightning struck again, illuminating the hotel room in harsh blue-white flashes. Elena sat on the edge of the bed, her phone pressed to her ear, the cable connecting it to the wall stretching taut across the cheap carpet like a lifeline she wasn't sure she wanted to hold.

"I'm not coming back," David said, his voice thick with sleep or maybe whiskey. Three thousand miles away, he was probably watching the same storm on radar, safe in their shared apartment while she sat alone in what was supposed to be their honeymoon suite.

"You said you'd fly out tomorrow," she said, hearing the pleading note she hated in her own voice.

"Work called. The merger. You know how it is."

She did know. That was the problem. The cable from her laptop to the hotel's unreliable Wi-Fi lay coiled on the desk beside her, another tether to the life that was consuming him. The life that had somehow become her life too, until she'd booked this ticket to somewhere tropical and forced them both to confront what they'd become.

Outside, the wind howled. Water sluiced down the windowpane, distorting the view of the palm trees bent nearly double in the gale. She'd always hated palm trees—the way they looked decorative but fragile, like something that would snap rather than bend. But these were still standing, taking the beating, refusing to break.

"You can't even see it, can you?" she said quietly. "That we're already over."

Silence on the line. Static crackled like the distant thunder.

"I love you, El. I'm just—"

"Busy. I know. You've been busy for three years."

She watched another bolt of lightning fork across the sky, violent and beautiful and utterly indifferent to human promises. In that flash of illumination, everything seemed suddenly clear. She could spend another decade waiting for him to choose her, or she could choose herself first.

"El? You there?"

She reached down and pressed her palm flat against the cold glass, feeling the vibration of the storm against her skin. Then she pulled the cable from her phone, watching the screen flicker and die.

"Elena?"

She set the disconnected phone on the nightstand and watched the palms sway in the wind, bending but not breaking, and for the first time in years, she felt like doing the same.