The Wellness Retreat

The water in the hotel pool was that impossible, chemical blue that exists nowhere in nature. Elena sat on the deck chair in her oversized cover-up, watching her colleagues form themselves into a human pyramid in the shallow end. Team-building exercise, the flyer had called it. She saw it for what it was: a physical manifestation of the corporate structure they were all trapped inside—those at the bottom carrying the weight of those above, straining and smiling through it.

She picked at the spinach salad she'd brought from the buffet. Cold, limp, overly dressed. Like her marriage, lately. Marcus hadn't even noticed she was gone for the weekend. Hadn't asked where she was going, how long she'd be. Just nodded when she mentioned the retreat, eyes never leaving his phone. They hadn't touched in months. Hadn't really spoken in longer.

The palm trees that ringed the pool swayed in a breeze Elena couldn't feel, their fronds creating shifting patterns of shadow on the concrete. Everything here was manufactured. The relaxation, the camaraderie, the personal breakthrough they were promised by lunchtime tomorrow. She was thirty-five and already her life felt like something that had happened to someone else.

"Elena! You're up!" It was Greg from Accounting, cheerful and tan and entirely too comfortable in his swim trunks. "We're rebuilding the pyramid. You can take the middle tier."

She set her salad down on the concrete. The spinach lay in a dark, sodden heap. A single leaf clung to the side of the plastic bowl, dark green against white, determined and somehow tragic.

"Actually," she said, standing up and slipping off her cover-up, "I think I'll go for a swim instead. Alone."

She dove into the deep end, into water that was too chlorinated and too cold, and for the first time in years, she didn't look back to see who was watching.