The Weight of What We Carry

The **palm** of her hand still held the ghost of his touch—light, tentative, like something you might accidentally brush against in a crowded room and spend years trying to find again.

Emma sat on the edge of the hotel bathtub while **water** streamed from the faucet, drowning out the sound of David packing in the next room. Two days ago, they'd been happy. Three weeks ago, they'd been discussing marriage. Now everything had curdled into something unrecognizable, all because of one drunken confession at a wedding reception.

She'd told him about the baby she'd given up at seventeen—a secret she'd been **bearing** for half her life, heavy and suffocating, like carrying stones in her pockets. And instead of holding her, instead of asking what she needed, he'd looked at her with something like pity. Not anger. Not confusion. Pity. That was what she couldn't forgive.

Through the window, she watched the sunset turn the sky the color of a bruised **orange**. They'd come to Palm Springs to reconnect, but now they were just two people who didn't know how to be in the same room anymore.

David knocked on the bathroom door. "Emma?"

"Give me a minute."

"I'm going downstairs. Want to get a drink?"

"No."

She heard him hesitate. Then: "Remember that **baseball** game? Our first date? You knew nothing about the sport, but you pretended to care because I kept talking about the Red Sox."

Emma stared at her reflection in the mirror. That girl had been so eager to be loved. "I remember."

"You could have just told me to shut up," he said softly. "I would've liked you anyway."

"I know," she said. "But I wouldn't have liked me."

She listened to his footsteps fade down the hall. The water kept running, and she didn't turn it off. Sometimes you had to let things overflow before you could understand where the damage was. She wasn't ready to go home, but she wasn't ready to stay either. So she sat there, watching day surrender to something darker, and wondered which secrets were worth keeping and which ones just kept you lonely.