Watching You Watch Me

The hotel bar was nearly empty at 2 AM, just me and the goldfish tank in the corner—a wall of blue- lit water where a dozen orange fantails swam in endless, mindless circles. I'd been sitting here for three hours, nursing scotch that had long since gone warm, watching their gills pulse in and out, in and out. Hypnotic. The kind of meditation you find when your marriage has just exploded.

Across the room, a man in a grey suit kept glancing at me over his newspaper. Not subtle. Hadn't been subtle for two hours. I should have been alarmed—midnight in a strange city, being watched—but I found myself thinking about how Marcus used to look at me like that, before I knew he'd been spying on my emails for six months. Before I found the keylogger on my laptop. Before I understood that love can curdle into something that looks like love but feels like possession.

The goldfish swam toward the glass, their tiny mouths opening and closing in silent screams or silent prayers. I used to think they had three-second memories. Turned out that was a myth. They remember. They just keep swimming anyway.

Lightning cracked the window behind me, illuminating the bar in stark white. The man's reflection in the glass showed him lowering his newspaper completely now. He wasn't reading. He was waiting.

"Elena?"

I turned. He was older than I'd thought, maybe fifty, with tired eyes and a face that had seen too many hotel bars at 2 AM. He held up a badge I couldn't quite make out in the dim light.

"Your husband hired me," he said. "He thinks you're meeting someone. He wants photos."

I laughed, and it felt like broken glass in my throat. Outside, lightning struck again, closer this time, the thunder shaking the floor beneath my stool. The goldfish kept swimming, their orange bodies flashing like emergency flares in the dark water.

"Tell Marcus," I said, finishing the warm scotch in one swallow, "that the only person I'm meeting is myself. And she's been trying to leave for a long time."

The private investigator lowered his camera. The goldfish turned, as one, toward the dark corner of their tank, beginning another circle. Swimming on, like nothing had changed at all.