Three Winters

Margaret found three gray hairs that morning, plucking them from her temple with the precision of a woman who had spent two decades measuring out her life in coffee spoons and quarterly reports. At forty-seven, she supposed she should be grateful they were only three.

"You're obsessing," David said, not looking up from his tablet. He was forty-nine, his own hair thinning like ice on a winter pond, but he seemed strangely resigned to it. "Let it go."

"Easy for you to say." She smoothed her caramel-colored strands, the ones she'd paid three hundred dollars to maintain last week. "Some of us still have something to lose."

David's lips tightened. They'd been having this conversation for three years now—since the promotion she hadn't gotten, since his father's stroke, since the bull market had turned bearish and taken their portfolio with it. The cat, Lucinda, wound herself around Margaret's ankles, purring as if she hadn't a care in the world.

"Thompson called me into his office yesterday," David said quietly.

Margaret's stomach dropped. Thompson was the new managing partner, a man whose management style resembled a bull in a china shop—hoofprints everywhere, nothing left intact. "And?"

"He wants me to head the Boston office."

The air left the room. Boston meant moving. Boston meant selling the house they'd finally paid off, leaving Lucinda with Margaret's sister, starting over at fifty with careers that had plateaued, a marriage that had grown comfortable but perhaps too comfortable.

"It's an opportunity," David said, as if trying to convince himself.

"Or it's him clearing house, and you're too polite to notice."

Lucinda jumped onto the counter, knocking over Margaret's coffee mug. The ceramic shattered.

They both stared at the spreading stain, dark as old blood.

"Three winters," David said suddenly. "I've been counting them. The number of times we've almost talked about leaving, about changing something. And every winter, we stay."

Margaret looked at her reflection in the darkened window. She saw the gray hairs she'd missed, the ones that grew like frost on a window, inevitable as winter itself. She thought of Thompson's bull-like determination to reshape the firm in his image, of David's quiet desperation to be seen as valuable, of her own terror that they'd become people who simply endured rather than lived.

The cat licked coffee from her paw, unhurried.

"Boston," Margaret said. The word felt foreign, sharp. "Maybe. Maybe it's time to let something break."

David's hand found hers across the counter. His palm was warm, familiar.

"Your hair," he said softly. "There's another one."

Margaret didn't reach for it. "Leave it," she said. "Maybe it's time to stop pretending."